A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.
Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.
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I’m sure the planet will be fine. It’s the inhabitants that will suffer.
Because the life that formed from this planet is somehow not part of this planet?
Do you even know how much stuff has lived and gone extinct on this planet? This is just a brief snapshot in time.
And at any other snapshot in our planets history, the life that grew on it would still be part of it.
The Earth has gone through several extinction events. There are plenty of plants and animals that have gone extinct without the help of humans.
Surprised someone did’t beat you to it
Is anyone really thinking we just need to reach Mars, then immediately set up a colony? No, reaching there is obviously only a first step, but once we can reach it, we can try things to see if we can live there. For myself, I’ve been saying we need to hurry up and reach Mars because we have like 100 years of work before we can establish a colony so let’s get started
I don’t disagree that having a self sustaining population of humans somewhere other than earth will be an important milestone.
But a much more pressing milestone is a the first self sufficient population, which I don’t see mars supporting
We don’t know if a self-sustaining population is possible anywhere other than Earth. However we know lack of gravity is one issue we don’t have a workaround for. Mars is the only “large” gravity we can possibly reach with our current level of technology
I think you missed my point, I don’t believe we have a self sustaining population on earth (yet)
I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.
If we’re going to get anything useful out of mining (other than just building material), it’s going to be incredibly sparse. I think we need to start asap working on robotic mining vehicles to wander around collecting and refining useful stuff. By the time we send people, we ought to have spent years collecting tankfuls of oxygen and water, caches of refined ores, piles of bricks and pavers (maybe even sheds/garages), maybe even sheets of crude solar cells, miles of wire.
Navigation and communication will be crucial, so we need to lead with a constellation of gps/communications satellites so no matter where you are, you know your location, can reliably contact your base, and even all back to earth. We’ll want many automated weather and seismic stations that need to send a flood of data somewhere
i mean shoot, mars is actually kinda worse than the moon in some ways. Like, the worst of both worlds except ‘worlds’ pertains to ‘celestial bodies in general’. You have the same ultrafine toxic razor sharp dust that gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and destroys mechanical joints on contact, but on MARS it gets blown around by dust storms that blot out the entire sky sometimes for months or years on end, whereas on the moon it only redistributes and resettles due to electrostatic repulsion (due to solar radiation).
Mars’ atmosphere is just thick enough to be a hassle for creating risk of burning up on reentry but still too thin to reliably drag-brake so you end up having to thread a much more annoying needle with respect to approach velocity, whereas on the moon it’s just straight up active thrust descent every time you’re landing.
In both cases, living on the surface is a sucker’s game and the only viable option would be to tunnel down beneath into the regolith where a sufficient rock barrier will block enough of the solar and cosmic radiation to not drastically shorten your lifespan.
Furthermore the energy cost to get a payload from earth to mars is LITERALLY ASTRONOMICAL whereas escaping the moon’s relatively weak gravity well to reach almost anywhere else in the solar system (including mars) is dwarfed by the oomph it takes to climb out of the earth’s gravity well in the first place alone.
I’d go so far as to say that a mars colony would never be viable until and unless we have a viable lunar colony
but make no mistake, a lunar colony is mandatory if we ever want to explore the rest of the solar system or not have all our eggs in one basket as a species. the moon is practically MADE OF the infrastructure we’ll need across the entire solar system,some assembly required. The amount of Aluminum and Silver waiting for us in that silicate regolith will be instrumental, especially because smelting and building up there will be drastically cheaper than manufacturing shit down here and then having to carry it ALL THE WAY UP ALL OVER AGAIN.
and like, that isn’t even factoring sending any of what’s produced back to earth, because even that might be a waste of effort when everything we could ever BUILD outside our gravity well is worth more being up there just by virtue of the fact that we didn’t have to pay through the nose to SEND IT.
It is less energy to go Mars to the moon than earth to the moon
It is also about the same delta-V to go from the surface if the earth to the surface of the Moon OR Mars. At least Mars has water.
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But gravity may be useful in many applications. We don’t really know how to effectively manufacture many things in microgravity at the moment. The moon would still be important for early space infrastructure.
Edit: In addition, the moon will be useful for mining and resource extraction for a long time, most likely, due to its proximity to earth and size.
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The gravity problem is also best solved away from the surface of any celestial bodies. Massive spinning space stations would be much more pleasant to live in in almost every way. Unless a planet or moon has a good reason to land on it (e.g. material to be mined) it makes much more sense to simply build a habitat away from the gravity well and build smaller work camps on the surface that can be supported by the main habitat(s).
The problem is that such space stations are very complex to build and maintain, and can more easily catastrophically fail. It’s certainly an option, but it may not be worth it.
Of course, all of this is speculation, but my point is mostly that if we don’t have sufficiently advanced space construction capabilities, surface habitats and infrastructure on the moon may be preferable.
You do realize that Martians abandon Mars because the protomolecule opens up worlds that are already habitable, so terra forming becomes pointless? It has nothing to do with infrastructure or economy, Mars is supposed to be an eventual second home, not a place to mine. They leave because interstellar travel becomes a reality before Mars becomes viable.
Unless we discover that Charon is actually a Mass Relay, Mars is the best possible second place for humans.
Titan is too cold and the atmosphere would require a full changeover, and the Galilean moons are constantly bombarded with radiation, Venus could support a floating colony but thats tenuous at best. Mars is basically it, if we can develop the tech to turn it into a reasonable place to be.
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Gravity is kind of necessary for long term human health though, at least until we figure out a way around that…
The most not caveat is we don’t know how much gravity is how necessary. We know that microgravity in orbit is too little and not really sustainable. Is gravity on the moon enough more for long term health? Is that on Mars? That’s just two of the questions we can’t know until we get there
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So you build spinning space stations instead of settlements on the martian or lunar surface. Likely close to the same material cost, if not cheaper, while allowing us to actually choose the amount of gravity to generate. We don’t know if martian or lunar gravity would even be sufficient to avoid negative health affects.
Do those count for gravity ? Are there other downsides that we haven’t even thought of? Many unknowns.
I’m sure I’ll never actually get to it, but I want to try to check this out next after the current book that’s taking way too long to read.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is a must-read.
Just finished the trilogy last week. Amazing books, a bit dry at times but overall a very enjoyable read about what the politics and technology might look like to terraform and colonize Mars.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
The moon’s barely got gravity, and our bodies need it.
A space station would be a good start so long as it spins so we can have the semblance of gravity.
No one knows if you can turn a profit mining asteroids.
If mining techniques reach the same level of advancement as on Earth? I don’t see why not. I also don’t see why bother to send ore back other than to pay-off some initial investment.
(One of) the biggest obstacles in space is leaving Earth’s gravity well, so sending mining machines to the asteroids would be interesting. Then maybe move the ISS to a La Grange point instead of destroying it, use it as a base to turn that ore into a spinning space station.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
I don’t know why this has become such a common talking point about why colonizing Mars is hard, it really has no significant impact.
For starters, it’s only meaningful for terraforming. Regular realistic colonization involves setting up domes or tunnels, none of that’s affected in any way by Mars’ magnetosphere or lack thereof.
As for terraforming, the lack of a magnetosphere means that Mars will “leak” atmospheric gasses due to solar wind sputtering over periods of time that are short on geological scales but are vastly longer than anything a human civilization will care about. If Mars were to magically have an Earthlike atmosphere appear on it today it’d be millions of years before it became unbreathable by this process. The human species has only existed for a tenth that long, and our civilization has only existed for a hundredth of that. If anyone still cares a million years ago they can just top the atmosphere back up again by whatever method they put it there in the first place.
Or, if you really have your heart set on that magnetosphere, build one.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.
Take air, for instance. If you’re considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole “town” — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it’d likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.
I often find that technological pessimists are imagining some very specific flawed scenario and then arguing about how that scenario is terrible or impossible, rather than arguing about the technology in general. Often the best way to debate them is to start by getting them to clarify exactly what scenario they’re thinking of, the limitations of their argument will usually become quite apparent just by doing that.
Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they’re talking about.
Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth’s gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it’s orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.
At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they’re talking about.
If we’re talking about space colonization then “at least for now” doesn’t apply any more.
There are vast quantities of oxygen available everywhere in the solar system. Extracting it is really not hard. There’s a technology demonstrator generating oxygen on Mars right now. If you’re arguing against space colonization because you’re assuming that every bit of resources the space colony uses will have to be sent there from Earth, you’re completely missing the basic concept of space colonization.
The level of automation necessary for manufacturing in space is going to be very close to removing humans from the process entirely. Taking it that one step further and having robots manufacture robots would eliminate all the issues with keeping flesh-and-blood human bodies alive.
Honestly I sometimes think the best legacy humans can hope for is giving birth to AGI. Machines would be much better suited to forming a solar or galactic civilization than biological entities ever would be. If we’re lucky, humans or meta-humans would still be around as what essentially amounts to pets.
It’s not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of “Mars colonization” - it’s missing ecology.
They can’t even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica… yet they “dream” of doing so in a place that’s hundreds of times more hostile to human life.
That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.
Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.
We need a real renaissance to shake it.
One of the mandatory precursors to that is a major Hundred Years war that kills lots of people and displaces even more.
Luckily, that’s one field where we’ve made a lot of progress, we won’t need even close to one hundred years.
I’ve been hearing this “we need a new renaissance” spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like “I’ve got no ideas, so I’ll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it.” to me nowadays.
“We need a new renaissance” is a dog whistle for “we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance”.
Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when “renaissance” is mentioned?
Give me a break.
Maybe some use as dog whistle but I am not. The color or creed of the people who were around during periods of progress is irrelevant to me. I care about the progress.
And Rome had more people of color in positions of power and influence than we can even dream of today. However they did have slaves. Lots of white, Germanic slaves. Google it and chew on that while you think about your accusations of racism.
One of the things standing in the way of an"civilization" on Antarctica is that it’s illegal to build a civilization on Antarctica. We could absolutely do it, assuming we were willing to fight a war and the resources were worth it
illegal
Oh, right… that is what has stopped the Phony Starks from building capitalist Utopia in Antartica - it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s utterly inhospitable to human civilization at all.
That and lack of exploitable resources, meaning a lack of capital. There’s no shortage of capital for the modern space age.
exploitable resource
Yeah… because Antarctica lacks water. And wind energy. And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.
Poor, poor Phony Starks… imagine being held back by legislation they could easily bribe into non-existence if they wanted!
Because Antarctica lacks water
We’re not exactly hurting for water
And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.
This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort
We’re not exactly hurting for water
This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort
I guess you’re the kind of fantasist that believe they invent food at the supermarket, eh?
California is a localized problem, as all water shortages are, because we live on a fucking water planet.
Fishing does not require supermarkets. It requires driving a boat to where fish are, then driving home.
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Biosphere 2 is a great story and I wish there were more follow ups. They tried to set up favorable initial conditions and then seal the hatch. They found that the environment inside shifted and became inhospitable. The crops they planned on didn’t all sustain. Then they called it all off.
What if they had allowed the biosphere to keep shifting until it found its equilibrium point, and then set about finding advantages in that? Crops that would sustain in that?
An iterative process could build on mistakes and learnings. A one-shot, naive, all-or-nothing attempt where your starting conditions have to be just right… no wonder that it failed, but where was the next iteration? Why give it all up instead of tuning? I know it’s about money, but I wish someone with money cared enough to keep this thread going.
That’s not why it failed:
“The vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water.”
In any case, it is still in operation.
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They would ship in a new scrubber but could they? We have to assume that a colony might need to self subsist for long periods, at least as long as Biosphere 2 was running, because of the practical considerations in shipping replacement parts to Mars.
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Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth.
These would be the problems that are currently being worked on prior to manned Mars (and to a lesser extent, lunar) missions.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars. That’s absurd.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars.
We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there’s the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that’s really, really hard to do. And that’s under the ideal conditions of Earth.
I do homesteading,
Lol no wonder you know so little about this
But you didn’t have NASA level technology. There is a lot you can do to increase food production using less space if you’re willing to pay the upfront and energy costs.
This is one of those things that will need baby steps.
— using local water and dirt are probably a minimum for any non-trivial stay
— yes we really need to be able to grow our own food, at least if we want to scale up from a temporary base for a handful to something larger or more permanent. Again, this is one of the things we probably need to go there to find out: is it possible to grow a lot of our own food?
I disagree, I believe we would ship containers of food to Mars in the early days. Just like we do for mcmurdo in Antarctica.
It’s doubtful we’d ship past the initial landing and support phases, which was my point. It’s likely we’d send several ships out for any permanent presence, but 18 months is just too long and too much investment between trips.
If you send say 20 people to Mars, let’s do the math. An average person requires approximately 2 to 3 lb of food per day. 18 months = 6,500 days x 20 people = 131,000 pounds of food, or about 65 tons. You could probably drop the weight significantly by freeze drying it and recycling the water.
In any case, 65 tons isn’t a whole lot - that’s about what, half of a starship payload? Zubrin’s a case for Mars likewise discussed the need to bring all of your food supplies over with you.
Now over many years you could build up enough buy a waste and build a recycling system to start recycling to buy a waste in a greenhouse, but we don’t know how viable like greenhouse on Mars will be for growing food. It’s likely going to have to be more of a grow lab/vertical farm setup. Very energy intensive.
Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?
AFAIK it only prevents weaponization of space.
It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.
Yeah it’s just that the sheer scale of planetary colonization kind of makes this a problem for the year 4,000 or so.
It prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over territory beyond Earth, but the colonies themselves can still be sovereign. Assuming the treaty continues as it is it just means that countries won’t be able to draw borders around vast lifeless regions on Mars or the Moon and claim jurisdiction over them, they’ll still be able to build cities there and the cities will be theirs to control.
Treaties like these lapse or get amended over time as the realities of life make them obsolete, though. I expect that once there are cities on Mars there’ll be borders as well.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” -JFK
Space is inhospitable to human life, but look at the countless inventions and benefits we’ve gotten from exploring space, the moon, etc. Humanity will continue to grow, learn, and try new things regardless of what the pessimistic Weinersmiths believe.
Im a little bit disappointed, i was expecting things that where only possible because of research made in space, not things that were developed because NASA thought they were needed for astronauts.
Edit: seeing the reaction, sorry if my disappointment disappoints you. We can very well use this argument to justify war
“We can’t do metric, there’s just so many road signs, and I’m tired” - every American, today.
Nobody is going to live on Mars until letting it out on Airbnb is profitable
All the more reason to send billionaires there.
I had some Elon-stan dude being adamant that it would be safer to colonize Mars because what if the apocalypse happened on Earth? I asked him what an event like that would look like and he said a giant asteroid. I linked him to a wiki page outlining major crater impacts on Mars to get him started and he never responded. I’d like to think that he learned a valuable lesson in astronomy but I can never be too sure.
That’s silly. The asteroid point isn’t that Mars is somehow asteroid-proof, it’s that having a presence on multiple planets prevents any one single planet-destabilizing disaster from causing our species’ extinction.
Right, but his thought process was that Mars was somehow immune to asteroid impacts and that made it safer. Like, he hadn’t considered that a single unfortunate event was possible. It’s ironically safer here on Earth but thought this planet had nothing going for it.
The point isn’t whether or not it could happen, the point is that it hadn’t crossed his mind and was jumping in with two feet at the idea.
Maybe, I try not to jump to conclusions based on my speculation on others’ thought processes.
And that’s fine, but don’t assume that’s what people do. You do you. I wouldn’t say otherwise if he hadn’t been explicit about it.
The point isn’t that Mars is somehow less vulnerable to asteroid impacts than Earth, it’s that asteroids aren’t likely to hit Earth and Mars at the same time.
He thought they didn’t happen on Mars for some reason and that he wanted to colonize it to hopefully abandon Earth altogether because we have apparently no hope here whatsoever and the planet isn’t salvageable anyway.
No fetuses have gestated in low gravity. That sounds like something we could do animal trials on.
But wow, getting a live sheep into space, and fed, and exercised, and cleaned, all for months… that alone is a big undertaking. Just to get a single data point that’s about another species.
I wonder what is known or not know. I’ve read about experiments with lower plants and animals but not what the results were, nor whether we’re ready to try more complex life
Everything I’ve ever seen about plants indicates that they grow abnormally in zero g. Life is complex and made up of many different chemical processes. All it takes is for gravity to have an effect on one of them and life goes awry. It’s humbling how fragile we are, how narrowly adapted when it comes right down to it. I remember learning that we can’t share most viruses with pets because their bodies are a few degrees of temperature off from ours. I thought wow, viruses are not very robust if they are attuned to living in such a very narrow set of conditions. But honestly we’re no different.
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Yes. Yes you could.
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If it was on a topic people care to read about, and was done well, yes.
I suppose it depends on how good of a writer you are.
Some writers can say things we all know so well that it’s like we’re finally understanding it for the first time. Some writers have a knack for delivering facts or prose with the perfect dose of humor; it’s not what they say, but how they say it that is valuable.
I suppose the question of what merits a book has is more complicated than just “does this book push the envelope of human knowledge”, huh?
Yes you can. Self publishing is surprisingly easy.
I have a couple of books by Zach Weinersmith and they are entertaining and interesting.
I believe you’re missing the point of this book. I also believe you’re being a bit of a prat. I don’t know, however, if those two things are connected.
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Sometimes books are valued for their original informational content alone. Sometimes books are valued for conveniently anthologizing disparate works. Sometimes books are valued for the entertainment quality of the writing. This is a book which endeavors to offer information and context about a hot topic to a general audience in an informative but entertaining way. I can guarantee that you’ve spent over $30 on something less valuable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unfortunately for the Weinersmiths, they actually asked questions like “how would that work, exactly?” Apart from rocketry (e.g., the getting to space part), the answers were mostly optimistic handwaving combined with a kind of neo-manifest destiny ideology that might have given Andrew Jackson pause.
The Weinersmiths start with human biology and psychology, pass through technology, the law, and population viability and end with a kind of call to action.
Apparently, nuclear weapons-wielding countries won’t react negatively to private citizens claiming large bits of space.
The magical thinking is more apparent when you realize that it is believed that encountering the vastness of space will make humanity ultra-altruistic, while still being good capitalists.
In a more realistic take on how societies function when there is only one source for the vitals of life, the Weinersmiths draw on the experiences (positive and negative) of company towns.
The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems.
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