Or, for a tiny fraction of the cost, build a thousand hardened bunkers, deep underground, all over the Earth - each with a couple thousand inhabitants. These would be survivable in many types of serious impact events, and the residents would emerge to an environment far more hospitable than that of Mars.
And the “Mars as lifeboat to escape the soon-to-be-inhospitable Earth” idea has another serious drawback beyond its impossible cost: how does a Mars colony become independent of support from Earth? Possible, perhaps - but far from easy or quick to happen.
The obvious approach is to make better humans. Not through G-E but through rigorous training, from a very young age. The voyagers need to be able to deal with the confinement of travel and the close quarters of the mission base for a minimum of three years, so they will have to have the mental toolkit that will prevent them from ripping each other apart like caged rats. And they should be able to develop abilities similar to what some Tibetan monks have shown, to lower their actual metabolism, in order to reduce their resource demands. This is in addition to the skills, wisdom and perception needed to cope with the Earthly ghost of Murphy, who will be there. The program will call for tens of thousands of candidates, from which maybe a dozen will be selected.
Most importantly, they will need to be fertile and horny enough to return to us with a handful of actual Martians. That is why we need to send humans to Mars.
Really more a debate than a GQ answer, but there are myriad things humans could and would do that a machine can’t. Off the top of my head I’d go with turning ones head and seeing something interesting over there and going on over to check it out as well as digging a hole 3 meters in depth to see what’s down there. Consider how far our rovers have gone in the time they have been there, then consider that humans on the planet could have walked that far and explored as much in the first week (of a mission that would have to be 6 months or more on the planet). Humans are simply more flexible and capable than machines.
This isn’t to say that robotic probes don’t have their uses too (and they are way cool…plus, they cost a lot less and you don’t have to worry as much if something goes wrong and you lose them), but human exploration of Mars is not pointless (it is dangerous, but not needlessly so, IMHO)…we would learn an order of magnitude more in a human trip in a year than we’ve learned or probably will learn from all the probes ever sent to Mars surface in all the decades we’ve sent them and will be sending them in the future (assuming the humans survive the trip of course).
As a for instance (since this is GQ), compare Opportunity (40km from 2004 to present) with Apollo 17 (time on the surface 22 hours, 35km). Humans would be on Mars at least 6 months and probably over a year…in that time they would explore and learn a hell of a lot more than Opportunity has since 2004. It will be a lot more dangerous, obviously, and will cost a hell of a lot more (a couple billion in adjusted dollars verse…well, gods know how much. $60 billion? $100 billion? More?), but the potential knowledge we’d gain (as well as the engineering and sheer experience as well as excitement for younger kids IMHO) is immense. It’s something that the US SHOULD do, though I think we should do it as an international expedition and include the other space faring nations in the adventure (even China…and I think we should also let them on the ISS, though that’s probably another thread).
So, anyone who has served on a submarine would probably qualify for the trip. being in those tight quarters, they would have lost it on Earth first. Course, you’d have to pick the most physically fit. But, going from a submarine to a long-term mission to mars is not that much of a stretch. Heck, you could do that on Earth, figure out what it would take for two years without any supplies, and test it.
That’d be a good way to vet the people for the trip.
Also, the thing about robots taking forever to move around is due to energy. They can only move so fast as they have batteries that are only so big, and, only so big as the robot itself could only be so big. I guess they could launch parts of a larger robot to the ISS, assemble it and test it, then, somehow, have another rocket launch from there to Mars.
I’d like them to include a microphone so we can hear what the planet sounds like, the winds and what not. Or, have they done that?
I’d find it hard to say why these tasks would be impossible - or even notably difficult - to a robotic probe well within current technology. In particular, the Mars rovers definitely spotted interesting things and then checked them out.
Indeed, the fair comparison is between what a human could do and what the hundreds of probes that could be sent for the same money (and distributed all over the planet) would accomplish.
Yes, legally lay claim to the land/planet as a colony for your home country.
Various treaties make any claims on extra-terrestrial land of questionable legality. But it would certainly be easier legally if you have sent human explorers to set foot on the claim.
Now any treaty signer could abrogate their signing; getting away with that would depend on their military ability to defend their claim against others who might dispute it. And did China ever sign any such treaty?
Realistically, it still doesn’t make sense. For the cost of a human mission to Mars, you could just buy a whole lot of world domination.
Mary Roach’s book “Packing for Mars” convinced me that people will never do interplantary or interstellar travel unless we find a way to breach the speed of light.
She told stories about space missions that had to be cut short because the astronauts (or whatever they’re called in their country of origin) were going insane or on the verge of killing each other. :eek:
No such Mars mission has been attempted yet. Some have been designed at the arm-waving level. AFAIK none have gotten past that arm-waving stage. Not impossible, but very challenging seems to be the current consensus.
We have had multiple successful sample return missions from asteroids. See Hayabusa - Wikipedia for one.
Late add: Russia attempted a sample return mission to Phobos, a Martian moon. Due to booster problems it never got out of Earth orbit, so we don’t know how well the rest of the mission might have fared. See Fobos-Grunt - Wikipedia
IMHO, the biggest limitations of current Mars rovers are bandwidth and lag time. The amount of data that can be beamed back to Earth is severely limited by the telemetry system. And the lag time limits how fast the rover can be allowed to move.
An operator on Mars would solve both problems. Then again, an operator in Mars orbit would solve the problem just as well. And even without manned missions, technology may easily solve both problems. Autonomous vehicle technology has come a long way in just the past few years; current Mars rovers don’t even have LIDAR, which most experimental autonomous cars have. Telemetry throughput can be improved just by throwing money at it (e.g. a high-power communication relay satellite could be sent to Mars orbit).
Right. Any fair comparison of robots vs humans has to factor in the relative cost difference.
The MSL cost a couple billion, but it would be less than a billion a rover if additional rovers were built and launched. Call it 500 million if you’re talking about a large scale.
Well, if a manned mission to Mars cost 250 billion, you could have 500 SUV sized rovers at different places on Mars, or about 3-6 astronauts. I don’t think this is even a question.
I recently read the late Werner von Braun’s 1958 plan for a manned Mars expedition. Assembly of the (multiple) Mars ships would involve 830 earth-earth orbit launches, to assemble the necessary components and supplies. Even today, this would costs a huge amount of money. Of course, his plan would not work (he assumed the Martian atmosphere had enough pressure to support a winged glider landing on Mars.
It could be done, but it would NOT be worth it.
I agree completely. If humans are more capable at all, it’s only because we can leverage better technology. Robots are technology.
As scr4 points out, the Chinese mission was a very low-cost initiative. It was more of a demonstration of concept than an actual scientific mission, and I would add that in many ways the technology and high-tech infrastructure available to the Chinese is decades behind the US.
Wha??? That’s the silly argument that was being used to denigrate AI back in the 60s. The only difference between a human and today’s AI is that humans carry around much more general and elaborate “programs”. “Flexible” and “creative” are just descriptions of a continuum of properties that all intelligent systems begin to exhibit at a given level of capability.
The real question is, what could robotics achieve in space exploration if some significant fraction of the incredible amount of time and money required to achieve manned missions was devoted to the development of robotics and unmanned space vehicles? I think the answer is pretty clear if you look at what scientific discoveries have already been made – despite extremely limited budgets – by robotic probes from back in the days of Mariner and Pioneer through Voyager, Galileo, Viking, Pathfinder, Curiosity, and countless others, not to mention earthbound ones like the orbiting observatories, versus any that could conceivably have been made by any realistically achievable manned programs. Robots have explored the solar system, while at best a concerted manned program might have had some humans living in an ISS-like habitat on the moon and a few landing on Mars, and we may well be asking – as many did after the Apollo program wound down – why we bothered.
As already said, of course, the strategy depends on the objectives. In the example of Mercury-Gemini-Apollo, as exciting as it all was at the time, the objectives were political more than scientific. If the objective is to establish permanent human colonies on other planets, then that tells us how to proceed. But such an objective isn’t realistic in any foreseeable future. But the objective of scientific discovery is feasible and compelling. The new focus on Europa is an exciting example of the next generation of robotic exploration.
The first step in solving any problem is to identify the problem. Let’s make a list of problems whose solution might include a trip to Mars.
A. We need to know more about the planet Mars (geology, atmosphere, life forms, etc.)
B. WNTKMA interplanetary communications.
C. WNTKMA human behavior in small groups when outside contact/communication is restricted.
D. WNTKMA the effects on human physiology of prolonged exposure to reduced gravity.
E. We need to develop advanced eco system technology.
F. We need to develop advanced space propulsion technology.
G. We need to put some of our eggs into another basket.
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but these issues are often mentioned as rationale for a crewed visit to Mars. The question becomes, “Is there a better solution to these problems given the limitations on resources with which we are faced?”
A., B., and F. could be accomplished by an equivalent expenditure ($$, not entities) on robotic probes.
Biospheres built in Antarctica or on the ocean floor would take care of C.
D. and E. could be addressed by building a rotating space station that would provide a platform for studying the effects of various levels of gravity over long periods of occupancy. This option could also deal with C., as long as strict limitations on communications are imposed.
The rotating space station could also be the answer to G. It could eventually be moved into solar orbit on the opposite side of the sun, providing a habitat with a better chance than Mars of surviving anything short of the destruction of Sol.
I would truly love to see humans travel to Mars. I just think we should focus our efforts and resources where they’ll do the most good in the short and long run. Sending more robotic missions throughout the solar system and building a sub-sea biosphere would keep us moving forward with technological research without committing to the politically unpopular, long-term expenses required for sending humans to Mars. A new space station could be next; then return to the moon. At some point, the incremental increase in cost and risk for a manned Mars mission wouldn’t be so difficult to sell.
