Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides similar challenges.
That right there is complete, unadulterated bullshit. The cost of getting a pound of supplies to Antarctica is several orders of magnitude cheaper than getting a pound of supplies even as far as orbit, let alone Mars. And Antarctica is a much less hostile environment (breathable atmosphere, for one).
That line alone tells me this isn't remotely a well-thought-out, plausible venture.
The logistics of supplies and rescue are a lot easier, sure, but the two environments have more in common with each other than the rest of the surface of this planet. You already need to live in artificial structures that can take a pounding, grow your own food with little from the environment but sunlight and some raw materials, and you can't survive outside for very long without ample protection. I mean, for a training environment, where else would you go?
Also, if you look at the context of the quote, you can see that they're making an analogy:
Living there [Mars] is comparable to getting by on Antarctica, and provides
similar challenges. However, the South Pole now has a number of very advanced,
large research stations that boast a great deal of modern facilities that provide
a good quality of life. These looked very different 50 years ago. The Mars
settlement will develop in the same way.
I agree. I have long wanted to spend time in Antartica, but I wouldn't set foot on a shuttle destined for Mars for this reason: breathable atmosphere. Maybe the Mars project is more comparable to sending people into deep sea, leaving them there, and sending fresh supplies with a 6-month delay?
> The crew is actually going to stay and live on Mars, with the intention to remain there, for the rest of their lives.
Wait what? Isn't that a really important part of the problem that shouldn't be just skimmed through as a mere detail on the video? Aren't the ethical issues that would arise from this, by itself, be enough to make everything else unviable. Humans live for a long time. What if after 10 years living there, the show just didn't raise enough money. "Hey crew, you'll just have to suicide, we won't send anymore food". Just so many huge issues come to mind. With not many obvious solutions. I would be interested to hear to which solutions they have, if any.
edit: their incredibly short FAQ answer about ethics doesn't make me anymore hopeful. They don't touch on any of the obvious hard problems and even dare to make an absurd analogy with immigrants from Europe to the Americas:
Oh please, those clowns aren't actually going to fly anyone to Mars. They aren't even remotely close to solving the genuinely hard engineering problems involved. So worrying about ethics is rather premature.
If someone announces his intention to build a time machine I wouldn't get too worked about the ethical concerns of changing history.
You say that with such certainty. I may be thick, but I haven’t seen enough to be convinced whether or not they know what they are doing and what problems are solved or unsolved.
I think it's a shame you were downvoted, because you seem to be asking an honest question: is this possible, or not? I've ranted a bit about why this isn't possible here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210984
Thought experiment. Imagine that we could send people to Mars, but we knew with 99%+ certainty they would die “prematurely” there, ahead of time. And those astronauts knew that.
Would that be ethical?
I sure think so. I know some people would disagree, but that doesn’t matter. As long as those involved know what they are getting into, it’s ethical enough to work.
Everyone is impressed at how real they're keeping it?
With the risks involved, and the $6 billion price tag (that will surely bloat out), there would need to be at least $50-60 billion in profit potential for rational investment.
Seinfeld is the top grossing show in history, at $2.7 billion.
Maybe they're hoping that billionaires with nothing else to spend the money on will cough up hundreds of millions to sponsor the project, just to get their name on it.
Either that, or they're not revealing the whole plan.
I have a hard time seeing any benefit to colonizing Mars without coupling it with a large-scale attempt at terraforming. If we're going to just put a domed colony somewhere, the moon makes far more sense.
I'm much more optimistic about putting more robots in space, such as Planetary Resources is working towards. As it becomes easier and cheaper to extend our virtual fingers outside our gravity well, we can eventually create places that are truly habitable for humans, and which sustainably scale.
You have to think beyond immediate practical applications and consider what an event like this would mean to our species as a whole. Neil deGrasse Tyson makes this argument better than anyone:
I'm against that plan though, because we tried the grand gesture approach and it didn't really lead anywhere. We don't need grand gestures, we need infrastructure and profitable things to do in space. For example, if somebody captures an asteroid rich in rare earths and begins mining it, they'll have every incentive to build a permanent station. We should build our way up and figure out how to make it work as we go, rather than trying to solve the hardest problem in human history with Big Up Front Design.
On Mars, you're surrounded by easily processed carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, and you have close to a 24-hour day/night cycle. Bring hydrogen with you, and you can quickly start producing air, water, fuel, and food. On the Moon, you're stuck having to import the full weight of all of the above.
Discovering feasibly concentrated pockets of ice in polar craters on the Moon would help, but still not with carbon or nitrogen, and whether any ice could be found in useful concentrations is an open question.
A Mars settlement could quickly become largely self-sustaining, without having to wait to be able to terraform first.
Without magnetic shielding I'm not sure how far large scale terraforming is going to get us. Any atmosphere we try to build up will just blow off into space. But I agree, put the dome on the moon.
As a life-long of reader "hard" sci-fi, making me a renown expert, IMHO:
How will humans survive the radiation?
How will humans remain mentally healthy?
I don't think we can feasibly become space faring until those challenges, and probably some others, are addressed.
Edit: Oh, I just had an idea. How do people with Asperger's deal with isolation, boredom, continuous contact with a handful of other people? Maybe there's a subgroup of people who are mentally perfectly adapted for space travel.
You read hard sci fi and you don't have answers to these questions?
Q: How will humanity survive the radiation?
A: Build igloos or inhabit caves or just plain dig into the ground. Problem solved.
Q: How will humans remain mentally healthy?
A: The Internet and social interaction with other colonists. Also, there is a lot of work to be done growing plants, managing systems, exploring robots, documenting and cataloging all that we find.
People, today, already live in extreme isolation for extended periods of time by choice.
I'm projecting. As an extrovert, I'd go nuts. So clearly I'm not making the trip.
I'm more worried about the time in transit.
For sanity, my assumption is that humans will need the ability to easily increase / decrease metabolism. So that 6 month, year, century trip would seem like a few days.
For radiation, I think space faring humans will need to be radiation hardened somehow.
I have Aspergers, and I can attest to this... I spend most of my time on my PC connecting to the world. I work from home as a programmer and I have maybe 4-5 friends that I see often (once every few weeks, I go for a walk to the store with one every day) but I spend the majority of time in my space, designing, building and deploying things online and reading to try to gain more knowledge of the world. Now, the question is, how would a personal space on Mars be any different from a personal space here? (I wouldn't go unless it was feasible and viable, and I could return within 10 years - just to be one of the first humans on another planet - I'm pretty comfy on Earth as it is, but I see the point you're trying to make here)
Fast-forward to the point of actual space colonization. Should mental stability be a factor in survival in space I can imagine that it'll introduce a rather strong darwinistic filter. It's difficult to fathom but realistic that folks with a short fuse have a severe disadvantage. Would it be required to undergo a psychiatric test before you can buy a ticket to an off-world colony and settle? Will people with a genetic predisposition be advised not to have kids? Will earth be a safe-haven for loonies?
Ah, yes. Just long enough for the population of the colony to reach hundreds of thousands before they all face miserable death by slow suffocation or radiation poisoning.
If you had an advanced civilization living there for thousands of years, without continuing the labors of terraforming, doing absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening (even when they know what will happen, while measuring the atmospheric levels slowly dropping)... maybe they'd deserve to die. I mean, that could only mean that they actually wanted to die!
This reminds me of an interview I heard on the radio 6 or 7 years ago with someone involved in a project to design & build a small set of robots that can self-replicate using the materials they get from breaking down moon rocks. The plan was to leave them on the moon for a decade, and bring them all back to serve as agricultural helpers on Earth. A caller into the station complained that it would eat up the moon, to which the scientist speaking chuckled and said it would only take a hair off the surface of the moon given how massive it is.
I realize this is barely related, just an interesting memory :) I can't remember who or what company that was, but I'm pretty sure it was a private one. Does anyone recognize this? I don't think it ever saw any sort of fruition.
> A caller into the station complained that it would eat up the moon, to which the scientist speaking chuckled and said it would only take a hair off the surface of the moon given how massive it is.
Well, if each of them would replicate on average into two or more new robots, then yes, they probably could eat Moon very quickly. Exponential growth is a pain :).
The moon creates our waves and wind of Earth. I don't really know how much pulling resources from the moon could affect the moon itself, or the moon's effect on Earth - though I'd rather not try and find out.
We would have to mine the moon for billions of years to even make a measurable change in its mass. There is very little risk we'll even get near that.
And you don't know, but other people do. You have no say on what they will try. Believe it when we tell you (and people less kind than me will eventually do so) your lack of knowledge and unwillingness to learn is far more dangerous than reducing the mass of the moon.
It really wouldn't take billions of years - though we won't know for sure with both of us throwing in assumptions, nor knowing how economics and mining for resources will impact the variables.
You're completely wrong that I, or you, have no say in what they will try. I can voice my thoughts, just as you can.
Not sure why you feel so disempowered about your voice to project on me that I'd have no say. Same goes for your assumption about unwillingness to learn? How do people learn?
A person makes statements, create discussion. We learn from eachother.
At first I thought "wow cool, a reality show on mars sounds like an awesome idea". Then I thought about it further and wondered "What would they actually do on mars that would make people want to watch?"
Diary Day 662: "Today we explored another crater, the dirt was quite similar to the last 83 days. John is still with Dianne and I haven't had sex in nearly 2 years. I've read the Harry Potter series 97 times now, maybe I'll make it to 100 by the end of the year."
I can imagine it lasting a few months or maybe even a year, but what happens after then when viewers stop tuning in?
I guess by then they're hoping they'll have set up a mining expedition or maybe other tourist flights and can raise money that way.
This project is completely ridiculous. Those people completely underestimate how extremely difficult it is to even land on Mars. Nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way, and yet these people are convinced they can simply put humans on Mars? Right.
You don't have to take my word for it, though. Take a look at what they say at their own site, and see if it actually makes sense. A few examples:
"In addition to this, the elements needed for a viable living system are already present on Mars, so we can keep the number of launches down. For example, the location Mars One has chosen contains water ice in the ground which can be extracted through heat and used to drink, bathe with, or used to feed crops, but can also be manipulated to create oxygen. Mars even has natural sources of nitrogen, another element of the air we breathe."
And we will extract these resources how? We theoretically know how to build such systems, but that's not the same as actually being able to build them on Mars. Are they just going to experiment during the project, and if it doesn't work then "oops, well, I guess you're all going to die"?
But, most ridiculously:
"Of course most of the elements we need are not yet exactly in the form we would like, but crucially: no brand new inventions have to be conceived, designed, tested and built for the mission to become reality."
That's like saying we can also build a colony on Venus right now. Or Mercurius. Or Jupiter. Because we have a theoretical understanding of how to launch rockets there and how to build space colonies, and of course the technology to do both these things already exist. What these people fail to see is not that we don't have a theoretical understanding of how we might do all this, but that without any practical experiments in several areas AND many failed tests the chances of this project going perfectly as planned (which almost never happens to begin with) are VERY slim.
> This project is completely ridiculous. Those people completely underestimate how extremely difficult it is to even land on Mars. Nearly two-thirds of all Mars missions have failed in some way, and yet these people are convinced they can simply put humans on Mars? Right.
Yes I don't think they have a real understanding. The founder of Mars One did two AMAs (ask me anything) on Reddit a while back [1] where he said "We are not scientists, we are entrepreneurs" [2]. A choice quote from a user:
> You have no one (I repeat NO ONE) on your team who is experienced or competent in anything related to space travel. The one guy on your team who you're showcasing has experience in land based telescopes and a small role in an experiment that was taken up by NASA... Which is pitiful compared to the amount of expertise needed in a lead on a project this ambitious.
If you check out the AMAs you'll see the above comment in action via the founder's answers to questions. Most of his answers are vague or difficult questions are just completely ignored.
You're advertising that you want to send humans to Mars by 2023 and you have NO idea how to do that. Your entire company is based on "wouldn't it be cool to go to Mars?" As a real entrepreneur building real things, this is like the new influx of business and marketting students (no offense to those that are in these fields) running around blabbering about these great ideas they have and all they need is an engineer to make it for them.
I don't believe it. Getting to Mars with people is going to be much harder challenge than the moon was. This[1] was a great episode of Nova (with Neil Degrasse Tyson) exploring the research NASA has been doing to prepare for a trip to Mars.
A much smarter plan would be to build a settlement on the Moon, build factories which build habitats, tools and mining equipment (to extract water, air, maybe food and fuel from either the Moon or Mars) and send a couple of those to Mars from the Moon, using a electromagnetic launch system before sending any humans. One could even remotely control the lunar equipment from Earth before risking astronauts there.
They plan to launch food supplies to Mars in 2016, 7 years before sending the astronauts and 2 years before they've even scouted out where to establish a settlement.
I don't understand why they would send the supplies there so early. Can anyone explain this timeline to me?
It's smart to launch supplies in low-energy orbits so as to increase the mass you can get to Mars for the same fuel budget. Humans have to transit quickly between the planets, but supplies can handle a much longer trip on a much less comfortable spacecraft and, to be there for the humans, they'll have to launch much earlier.
And yes, no sane human being would consider launching to Mars before a return vehicle is already settled at the destination and ready to take off. The return vehicle and its backup. And the habitats, supplies and everything else.
The way I see it, there's three outcomes to a goal like this:
1. Humans never go to Mars
2. Humans eventually decide it's interesting enough to go to Mars out of curiosity and find a way to get there
3. Earth looks doomed, but there's a slim shot at saving humanity by sending some people to Mars
I'm kind of disappointed there isn't more interest in something like this. Let me ask you all something. If someone in 1960 told someone else "I bet we'll have a man on the moon before the decade is over", what do you think the reaction would be?
It's not a lack of capability that's keeping us from getting to Mars; it's that people just don't care enough.
Are there any experts who can comment (without bias) about the validity of these claims? It's quite hard to tell just from this whether or not this is a joke, or whether it's an exciting, plausible initiative.
Here's a good idea, why not "go through" with the project, then fake the entire media spectacle.
You could build up the exact same media hype and have less costs! Good thing they have a team member who has "...worked for over 20 years in the graphics industry".
I doubt it. But I think it would be possible to be living on the moon in that time frame. Plus, we could be shuttling all of our garbage into space and mining the moon. Space 2029 Redo.
i don't get it why they try to make this look like something that can be done as they say.
it's a joke. we don't know what are the effects of spending one day on mars let alone be there for the rest of the astronauts life.
and we'll just make it a $6 billion dollar reality show out of it... oh and the astronauts, will learn how to work on mars. they better do because with 6 billions budget to get there and provide them with life support for the rest of their lives is not gonna be easy.
That right there is complete, unadulterated bullshit. The cost of getting a pound of supplies to Antarctica is several orders of magnitude cheaper than getting a pound of supplies even as far as orbit, let alone Mars. And Antarctica is a much less hostile environment (breathable atmosphere, for one).
That line alone tells me this isn't remotely a well-thought-out, plausible venture.