Musk seems to be ignoring the fact that getting there is the easy part. You then have to survive on a frigid alien planet with almost no atmosphere, no food in the environment, essentially no available water and no human infrastructure. Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
Mars has more fresh water than Earth does. Most of it is frozen, but thawing it shouldn't prove impossible.
> Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
I don't understand this. Are you committing suicide right now, by living out your life on Earth? You're here on Earth and you're going to die here. Does that mean you've committed suicide? How is that any different from people living indoors on Mars? Sure, they may die there. But people die here too. It's not suicide, it's a way of life that people will choose.
Also, you are incorrect in your silly assumption that life will be harsh for the millions that arrive - it seems much more likely that we could send robots to build the infrastructure while the first few land, making small cities, etc, and otherwise preparing for the mass arrival.
Yes, there are millions that would want to go. I've been thinking about this for more than a decade and I am desperate to go live on Mars when it becomes possible.
Antarctica has more fresh water than the rest of Earth too, and on top of that it's twice as warm as the Martian poles, far more accessible and even has a breathable atmosphere — but there aren't millions of people there either, and it's still considered a very harsh environment. In fact, even the people who live in Antarctica tend to avoid it in the winter.
> Also, you are incorrect in your silly assumption that life will be harsh for the millions that arrive - it seems much more likely that we could send robots to build the infrastructure while the first few land, making small cities, etc, and otherwise preparing for the mass arrival.
AFAIK, this is not literally impossible, but is way beyond our technological ability right now. If you mean a couple of centuries from now, yeah, maybe. But do we even have any proof-of-concept cities built entirely by robots on earth? (And keep in mind that to really reflect Martian conditions, they'd have to be thermally insulated cities that produce their own energy without any geothermal or hydraulic input and very little solar input and which have independent air supplies — but any cities built by robots would surprise me.)
The advantage of Mars IMO is that it gets all our eggs out of the Earth basket. I'm not pessimistic about our future, but it would definitely be nice to not be living on a single point of failure in the event of a nuclear war, asteroid impact, pandemic, et al. This, I believe is Elon's reasoning as well. However, I don't understand as yet why he's choosing Mars over the Moon. I've heard him say both are good candidates but he's obviously shooting for the former. I suppose the nuclear doomsday scenario would a little more possible to take out both the Moon and Earth. Also life on Earth depends on the Moon for the tides etc... I wonder if he's trying to distance the baskets so to speak.
I definitely agree in principle, but on the other hand, it's really hard to imagine an event that would render Earth less hospitable than Mars. In general, these catastrophes would just make Earth more like Mars.
Nuclear war? Mars is a desolate wasteland that's bombarded with ionizing radiation from space (because it lacks both a sufficient atmosphere and a magnetic field to protect it).
Asteroid impact? Unless it eliminates all of our atmospheric oxygen, ozone, hydrogen and nitrogen and drops the average surface temperature to -55°C, we're still better off here.
Pandemic? If we can protect a colony from the environment of Mars, we should be able to keep at least that many people safe from a pandemic. (Just stick your Mars-bubble in Antarctica if nothing else. It's a lot like Mars except it has better temperatures, an atmosphere that you can breathe if you need to and the water is more readily available.)
All of that's true in the short term, but if we do end up getting millions of people sustainably living on Mars, these specific catastrophes would be less devastating to the human race as a whole.
I have to say that motivating with fear puts red flags up in my mind as I'm sure it does with the rest of the crowd here. If I were a politician, I'd see the mission to colonize space as an effective way to unite the world behind a single goal. Since I'm not, I have a different view which is that AI has the greatest potential to solve humanity's problems. But that's another discussion.
You could replace 98% of the earths atmosphere with Methane and it would still be more habitable than Mars. (The only way methane would make it worse is if you turned the atmosphere into a fuel air bomb and a few weeks after the detonation it would one again be more habitable.)
Well, I was referring to the hypothesis that the release of previously sequestered methane caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event where 96% of marine species and 70% of land species died [1]. I think it's fair to say that a poisonous atmosphere is less habitable than no atmosphere.
Exposure to the Martian environment would kill 100% of species that we know of. If that has happened on earth before, we can say pretty definitively that elevated levels of methane are less harmful.
Earth's is 101,000 Pa dropping to 30,000 on top of mount Everest. Mars's mean surface pressure is around 600 pascals which is below waters triple point which prevents water from forming regardless of temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point Still that's close and in some creators the pressure increases high enough so it's possible for water to form.
Unfortunately, on top of that what makes the atmosphere truly deadly is a lack of Nitrogen one of the primary building blocks for organic chemistry.
It's essentially impossible to own property in Antarctica, and very difficult to set up any sort of business there. Despite that thousands of people still visit Antarctica every year.
Antarctica is not on a diffrent Plant. Lifing there will not earn you a place in human history.
I think a lot of stuff can be send to mars in the beginning. It should not be to hard to build a big house in a couple of parts and stick them together on mars.
Even if we assume that you can send a whole house to Mars for free, your house needs to solidly insulated from the cold and the radiation, it needs to somehow produce air and it needs to somehow produce energy without most of the energy sources we use on Earth (fossil fuels, solar, geothermal, hydro, wind). The latter two are very hard problems. If you can sustainably create breathable air and energy practically ex nihilo, that is a much bigger achievement than getting to Mars.
I was making a general point. I didn't agree with the 50 years thing. It probebly want be posible in 50 years but then again if we are not going to trie we can be sure it want work in 50 years. Just like with the 10 years to the moon thing.
Your comment is singularly unenlightening. I'm just saying that Musk's comments create unreasonable expectations. If you materially disagree, this kind of sarcasm does nothing to express what you think is wrong. If you don't actually disagree, then you're just kind of being rude, aren't you?
> Musk seems to be ignoring the fact that getting there is the easy part.
I saw a talk given by a NASA program manager in DC. She said that whenever this topic comes up, there's always somebody who starts seriously considering one-way missions to Mars. The next thing that gets considered is who would volunteer for such a mission, which is immediately followed by who the NASA program managers would volunteer to send.
If you can maintain living in a spacecraft - an environment much more inhospitable than Mars - for 18 months (there and back), I'm pretty sure a month or so on Mars is relatively easy.
This conversation isn't about spending time I'm Mars; its about living their indefinitely. Living there indefinitely means either shipping everything out (ridiculously expensive and inefficient) or creating our own Earth-esque biosphere over part of the planet, which is an extremely difficult task.
Mars atmosphere is not that problematic. Melt the poles with nuclear reactors. This creates a CO2 atmosphere. Then use plants to convert CO2 to O2. Now you have a breathable atmosphere, and more heat trapped and thus a more temperate climate. Mars is particularly cool because you can actually terraform it without having to resort to unobtanium. Other planetary bodies and moons locally, not so much.
Without a magnetic field wouldn't this new atmosphere be blown away by the solar wind? If so, it seems a little irresponsible to propose melting the poles. It seems like a better idea to dig deep and build cities under the surface.
I am also no expert, but from what I've read, probably not in the long term. It's commonly believed that Mars used to be more Earth-like, but the deterioration of its magnetic field caused its atmosphere to seep away into space. (Mars' gravity is also just generally weaker than any planet except Mercury.)
i'm pretty sure he hasn't taken on the challenges he's chosen because they were easy.
Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
The same could have been said about crossing oceans or strapping into a seat to travel thousands of miles at 30k feet in the air over mountains and open water. Safety is naturally an issue. One can never know what the future will be like, but I'd be fairly confident in saying that the world a hundred years from now will not be the world of present. I think it's that you're ignoring history, not that he's ignoring what's easy and what's not.
By the time millions are willing to sign up, it's likely that it won't be the expensive way to commit suicide anymore. I mean who knows, maybe we'll be shipping our criminals to mars.
If we knew for a fact that on the other side of the ocean was a place that had no food, air, energy sources or practical means of return and where touching anything in the environment will severely injure you from the intense cold, I don't think many people would have done that either, and those who did would not have living descendants today.
But anyway, if Musk is talking about the year 2500, yeah, I'll admit I have no idea what anything will be like then. And neither does Musk. Tautologically, nobody can really predict much outside of the foreseeable future. We could have perfected cold fusion by then, or a major cataclysm could have decimated the human race and left us in a new ice age. I don't feel any more qualified to say what that year will be like than somebody in 1511 was to predict what we'd be doing nowadays.
I honestly don't think history can prepare us for the concept of colonizing another planet. In fact I think the only thing history can tell us is "Humans are part of a very long chain of life that has evolved symbiotically with planet earth", beyond that I'm pretty skeptical. Mars has no magnetic field, 38% of the gravity of earth, non-existent air pressure, and is geologically and biologically dead.
> Earth is actually quite an inhospitable planet as well.
Perhaps in some light this may be true, but compared to Mars, Earth has a natural atmosphere that we can breathe, water we can drink, and produces plant life that we can eat. I'd call that downright hospitable.
Where do you get your water and food? Do you subsist on a foraging diet and drink water only from nearby streams.
Technically speaking, the carrying capacity of the Earth under such conditions is low. Prior to the advent of agriculture and modern sanitation the human population was naturally limited. First by the availability of food, then by the problems of disease inherent in city living. The technology to live the way humans do today is only about a century old. Our food and water typically are the products of industry and technology. Mars would up the ante a bit but in essence would be little different. The norm on Earth is not free roaming foragers living naked out of doors.
Actually, most of the water we drink does come from relatively nearby (particularly relative to hauling ice from the poles). There's a reason the Sahara is not densely populated. Likewise for our food.
Most of Mars' water is at its south pole, which is so cold that much of the water ice is actually buried under a layer of "dry ice" — frozen carbon dioxide.
Basically, anywhere you are on Earth, you're closer to nutrition and fuel than you would be anywhere on Mars. And the reason why can have diets that don't involve foraging is because we've grown so numerous. That's also something that isn't true on Mars.
My point is that the norm for folks living in the developed world on Earth is for their food, water, and housing to be obtained via a very technologically advanced and typically world spanning industrial supply chain. The amount of effort and technology that goes into something as simple as buying a single hammer at the hardware store or turning on the faucet and getting fresh drinking water is stunning. The difference between what's required to support a Martian civilization and an Earth civilization is not so much a difference in fundamentals as it is merely a difference in degree. And possibly it's less of a difference between, say, living in New York city today and living on Mars in 2030 than NYC today vs. NYC in 1800.
As far as water, the largest deposits of H2O on Mars are near the poles but it exists in enormous quantities at nearly every location on Mars a few meters below the surface.
Atmosphere itself is plant technology. It wasn't here before life and it won't be here after. Earth WAS pretty inhospitable, life just overcame those hurdles. Chances are we can do it again. It won't be easy, cheap or quick though.
I don't think you quite understand. Earth's atmosphere existed all along; its composition was just different before plants came into the picture. But even plants need certain atmospheric conditions, such as the existence of an atmosphere and certain elements in it. Now, it's true that the composition of Mars' atmosphere is all wrong even for plants (for example, very little nitrogen), but more fundamental than that, its atmosphere is literally barely there — the gas around the planet is exceptionally thin. Venus, Earth and Mars are like the three bears — Venus has way too much atmosphere to support life as we know it, Mars has way too little, while Earth's is just right.
Venus is hot enough to sterilize anything that even approaches its surface. Earth's most radical extremophiles don't even come close to being able to withstand that. Even life made out of many common metals wouldn't be able to exist because it would melt them.
Since we don't know the limits of what might be considered "life," I suppose we can't 100% say it's impossible, but that's why I said "life as we know it."
There are many materials that melt above 500C, so it gives theoretical possibility for existence of life on Venus.
I couldn't be carbon-based life though.
BTW, Venus civilization would have similar reasons of not going to Earth as our reasons are of not going to Mars: way too cold and not sufficient atmospheric pressure.
"Earth is actually quite an inhospitable planet as well. We survive on it because of our technology - Mars may be no different."
Seriously? That's not entirely accurate. It's true the humans is able to defend against predators and poor environments with our tools, but that's not something unique to our species. Mars is not capable of sustaining life as we know it, and that's the basic problem. The amount of tools needed to convert Mars to such a place may be prohibitive.
The trouble isn't surviving on Mars. The trouble is building infrastructure on Mars that will allow people to survive there without continuous resupply from Earth, at a cost measured in (at a minimum) tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram.
"at a cost measured in (at a minimum) tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram"
[citation (or math) needed]
The minimum cost for sending cargo to Mars even with only current levels of technology is far, far lower than tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram. A reusable Falcon Heavy (which is being researched currently) could potentially launch payload to Mars for circa $100/kg. To put it another way, that's 10,000 tonnes per $1 bil.
That's the expendable Falcon Heavy. SpaceX is also working on a fully reusable Falcon 9, which would naturally allow for a fully reusable Falcon Heavy. The fuel costs for a Falcon Heavy are around half a million dollars, if we posit that overall operational costs per flight could be kept to around 1.5 million dollars then costs of delivering cargo to Mars would be around $100/kg. That's a pretty straightforward extrapolation of current trends. If we imagine some ways to make the process more efficient we could imagine batching up cargo in LEO and pushing it to Mars via electric propulsion (a proven technology), for example.
These are pretty decent conceivable practical minimums for cost of shipping cargo to Mars within the next 20 years, though any estimate (minimum or otherwise) beyond that time frame would be entirely speculative due to the potential for technological advances.
You claim that the figures for Falcon Heavy cost of launching to Mars are "optimistically low", but that is not the case. Firstly, Mars launch is a well understood problem on the scale of launch to GEO. Second, the figures SpaceX are quoting are launch prices which include a substantial profit margin. The actual costs (especially after development costs have been amortized) are lower. And as I pointed out this doesn't represent a proper reasonable estimate of the floor for launch costs to Mars even over the next 20 years, let alone over the next, say, 50.
Earth is not all that inhospitable even if you lack technology. There are something like 10 quintillion insects inhabiting earth. The number of bacteria is several orders of magnitude greater. These things all get by just fine thanks to Earth's sweet conditions.
But if you dropped a colony of one of these natural survivors on Mars, it would simply die. Even what we consider to be harsh environments on Earth (e.g. Antarctica, the bottom of the sea, the top of Mt. Everest) are quite hospitable relative to the average on Mars.
Maybe Musk has a mad scientist program researching Martian terraforming. If he decided to crash a couple rovers carrying nukes into the Martian polar ice caps to create a greenhouse effect, does the US government have the legal or technical capability to stop him?
No one owns Mars. Whoever gets there first and can hold it owns it. If Musk is first then it's his planet until someone else shows up to challenge him for it. If it's his planet he can do as he pleases.
This is a bit late, but in case anyone happens to be reading this in the future: Almost every country in the world has signed a treaty agreeing, in essence, that it isn't possible to claim alien planets. So if Musk tried to claim Mars, he would be a criminal on Earth.
You are of course referring to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which governs claims on celestial bodies by the ratified signatory nations. It affects states that are party to the treaty. The US and 99 other nations have agreed not to claim ownership of celestial bodies. The treaty has no bearing whatsoever on what private individuals, corporations, and non-signatory nations may do, nor does it prescribe violation of the treaty as a criminal act as you claim.
For those in the future finding this comment, here is an article arguing why even for the nations who signed it it was bad law that has hobbled the exploration of space and expansion of the human species onto other worlds.
Fortunately, now that private corporations run by visionaries are able to colonize space, the treaty no longer can hobble progress and damage mankind's future.
In that text, I see no claim that he will bring millions to Mars. He just say we should want there to be millions.
The easiest way to get there is to bring a few thousand or even a few hundred people there and let nature do the rest (isn't there a short story from Asimov about this, where a lottery decides the composition of a 500-person star ship?)
Done that way, most of those millions would not be volunteering.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that although an easy step, it also has to be taken.
Being able to survive on Mars is irrelevant if you can't even get there.
I have no real (non-software) engineering background, and I could probably design, within current technology, shelters and mechanisms sufficient to keep people alive on Mars indefinitely.
The problem is, there is no way you could possibly get my contraptions to Mars. They'd be huge and extremely heavy.
The easier it is to get stuff to Mars, the bigger and heavier it can be, and the easier it is to keep people alive.
Not exactly. It takes 9 months to get to Mars. Aside from all the logistical problems of keeping humans alive in a tiny capsule for 9 months, who would in their right mind want to do this to themselves? You would probably go insane.
You forget that astronauts were lining up to fly the Space Shuttle even after two of them exploded.
There will be no shortage of qualified volunteers for the first Mars mission, and the idea that people will go insane simply by being in a capsule for 9 months has been pretty much disproven by the recent Mars500 project.
I think there are plenty of people (who arguably are not in their right mind) who would. Remember one million people is only 0.00014% of the global population.
