Airplanes had immediate human applications every step of the way. Nobody puzzled over the question “how will this make my life better?”
And this is how it is different than Mars. The hesitation is not so much about if it is possible, but more about the fact that there is no immediate reason to go there.
You know what is even better than babies being born in a martian greenhouse? Babies being born on a green planet that is hospitable and open to them and doesn’t really have a ton of drawbacks n
When we have a viable, working space station just like the one in 2001, then we will be ready for a serious Mars trip.
I could swear I’d read that a replica had been successfully flown. And Wikipedia says a modified version was flown for a few hundred feet a decade later.
Tru dat. At any rate, I’m not trying to dispute the Wrights’ claim to have been the first to manage heavier-than-air flight, I was just trying to straighten out levdrakon about what I was saying about relative difficulty. If there had been no Wright Brothers, someone would have managed controlled heavier-than-air flight before too long. Hell, just the fact that the technology and knowledge base of the day had advanced to the point where a couple of intelligent mechanics, without so much as a financial backer or company behind them, could manage that feat, demonstrates that the time was very ripe for air travel, in a way that it most certainly isn’t for interplanetary travel.
We landed a manned craft on the moon that lifted off again from the lunar surface. While I realize that Mars gravity is a bit more than double that of the moon, I can’t see that that would put this particular aspect of the problem in the “no idea how to do it” category.
The main difficulty, AFAICT, is the simple but intractable matter of the far, far greater distance to Mars than to the moon, and the challenge of creating an environment that will keep our frail bodies alive for the long trip there and back again. If Mars were orbiting the Earth at a distance of a couple million miles, we could do this - and might have, already. But it’s not.
And we can’t underestimate the psychological factors too: You’d have a crew of what? 3-6 maybe, that would have to spend a loooooong time realllly close together. Sooner or later, someone’s gonna start getting on someone’s nerves.
Would it be possible for you not to attempt to hijack every thread on space exploration and technology with your own completely extraneous hobbyhorse? Thanks.
Stranger
I’d bet money that a man will make it to Mars in the next 25 years and SpaceX will be the ones to do it, with or without the government. They have the ambition and the technology.
You really think Elon Musk is going to sit on his laurels and make silly Earth-orbital satellites and rockets for the next 25 years?
You do understand that Elon Musk is a) not any kind of expert about aerospace engineering, space exploration, or extraterrestrial habitation, b) enjoys talking in grandiose and bombastic terms about his essential ignorance of the difference between making websites and space propulsion/habitation technology (see a), and c) has basically pulled his investment out of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation now that it has attracted enough venture capital investment to maintain operations for the next few years?
Ambition is nice, but at the end of the day you have to be able to pay your employees and suppliers, which means that at some point you have to demonstrate a profitable enterprise (or be a recipient of corporate welfare). No rationale has yet been advanced for recouping the cost of a manned mission or outpost on Mars, and the scientific merit for such versus robotic exploration at two or more orders of magnitude less cost does not provide any reasonable basis for such an endeavor.
Right now SpaceX stands to offer competition to existing commercial space launch providers like the United Launch Alliance and Orbital Sciences Corporation, provided they can offer lower launch costs and higher reliability and performance, which has not yet been demonstrated. A logical, fiscally valid next step from developing the ability to send payloads to Low Earth Orbit is not to put people on celestial bodies where they bounce around clumsily in bulky and restrictive pressure suits, requiring costly support and protection, but to start exploring means to extract mineral resources from Near Earth Objects and invest in the space infrastructure to perform refinement and manufacturing operations in orbital space where pollution and energy availability are not restrictive considerations.
Stranger
How much money? My chances of being around to collect in 25 years are pretty good.
Think about this.
Let’s say the program to get to Mars is a rousing success. We have developed a largely self-sufficient colony of, say, 25,000 people and have started to terraform larger areas. We’ve succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
What have we achieved? Humans have a place to live? All that energy is being spent on giving humans a place to live? Don’t we already have one of those?
Could it possibly be “better” than Earth? Probably not. If you are the sort of person who gets the opportunity to go to Mars, the earth is already treating you pretty well. And there are obvious problems with taking the world’s poor and shipping them off to Mars. Being a “pioneer” may be attractive in theory, but how many of you really want to be farmers? That’s why people need new lands- so they have access to more farmland. If you are not interested in a homestead in Alaska or Zambia, why do you think you’d be happier with a homestead on Mars?
In any case, humans are great at filling up spaces. Even if we got a perfect planet up and running, in no time at all it would be crowded and full of population pressures, just like Earth. And we’d have gained what, exactly?
And that is in the best case. The most likely situation is that we have an expensive and difficult to maintain base up there for a while until everyone loses interest, like the ISS.
What? The environment is not my “hobbyhorse” at all- I’m the one who is always railing about malaria eradication. My comment wasn’t about that at all, I simply mean that we already have a perfectly good planet that is great at supporting humans, and I’m not sure why we’d want to them go to a planet that sucks at supporting humans.
If I were a child born on a Mars colony, I’d be pissed off. I’m on a barren, hostile rock that will only grudgingly support me with the help of extreme interventions. And yet I know there is a place out there where humans can happily lounge in their shirtsleeves, eating the fruits that fall off the trees and the fish that leap out of the seas. Imagine an entire planet that requires next to no interventions to live in many areas, and minimal ones (an overcoat, a house, a fire in the fireplace) in others. It’s a place where humans can roam freely, without fear, and make homes and families that could, theoretically, thrive off of not much more than what they have on their land.
I’d be pissed off to be cut off from 10,000 years of human history, from the San cave paintings to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. More excruciatingly, I’d be pissed off to be cut off from the beauty of human diversity. I wouldn’t be able to visit an Indian temple and hear the tinkle of ankle bells and the scent of jasmine. I wouldn’t be able to cross the Sahara with Tauregs. I wouldn’t get to share a bowl of noodles with newfound friends in Shanghai. In exchange for this, I’d have what? Vast, empty, probably hostile and unlivable spaces?
I’d be with a limited, carefully vetted group, that are there for a specific purpose. I’d only ever have the chance to see a small slice of humanity. I’d only hear a handful of languages- probably not a lot of speakers of Tibetan or Daba or Setswana out there. I’d only read about the fullness of humanity in books.
And if I ever wanted to go back to the world that I was made for, the world that my entire history is on, I’d have to choose a decade of my life to give up. Which decade would you choose? Your 20s? Your 40s?
And this is the best case scenario. It seems worse that pointless, it seems outright cruel.
Hummph. I’d like to see a man go to Mars. There’s something about space travel that makes me feel all patriotic and shit.
I do reject the notion that it’s politicians who are excited about Mars. Politicians (and most people) seem to think that NASA gets more funding than it actually does. Obama cut a few programs - and probably cut our abillity to send a man to Mars for a looooooooong time.
hey, I’m happy we have NASA. I’d love to explore space…and I’m sure that there are plenty of would-be astronauts who are willing to risk their lives to go to Mars (or try).
The Mercury 7 didn’t know if they’d make it. It was sort of a test run for the moon.
What we have achieved is the survival of the human (and probably other) species when an extinction-level event inevitably occurs here on Earth.
That is making a lot of assumptions. You are assuming that Mars can be made entirely self-sufficient and won’t need any input from the Earth (which, if it is possible, will take a long time.) You are assuming that this “extinction level event” doesn’t also affect Mars, which can’t be counted out. Solar events can reach both planets, and plagues and wars may not stay confined.
And then, there is the fact that an extinction-level event will eventually reach Mars, too. And the barriers to colonizing beyond Mars are literally lightyears more complicated and may not be possible. And there isn’t much we are ever going to be able to do about the real end of the universe. It’s not a matter of living or dying- it’s a matter of trying to hang one a bit longer before the inevitable.
In any case, nobody is saying we should never go to Mars, only that it’d make more sense to focus on unmanned space travel until there are natural incentives to go there, and that this might not be until we’ve made some technological advances. If avoiding extinction is our goal, another hundred years probably isn’t going to hurt us.
“Inevitably,” on what sort of timescale? It’s been 65 million years since the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.