Jon Goff is running a poll. The answer for me is none of the above. I’m not really a pioneer — I’m too hedonistic, and I’ve never had much of a lech for even going to Mars, let alone living there.
40 thoughts on “What Would You Do To Live On Mars?”
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For me too, although I’d be slightly tempted if there was an enormous surplus of women. 🙂 Not enough to go though. On the other hand, I’d love to spend some time in a holiday resort on Mars, but even with really, really cheap lift the travel time would be a serious obstacle. My best hope is that I’ll live long enough to be able to afford a suborbital hop or see my children or grandchildren – should I have any – go.
I want to go *and* come back.
I’ll happily enable would-be colonists. But I’d rather be the captain that thanks them for flying my spaceline, then prepares for the return leg of the trip…
Rand,
I agree with you on this one. Mars is a great place to do research but offers poor prospects for a viable settlement because of both the deep gravity well and great distance from Earth.
If I wanted to engage in personal travel fantasies with 0% chance of being realized, I’d pick a fantasy destination more interesting than Mars.
Why would anyone want to go to Mars – it’s a desert on steroids. Robots are cheaper and they don’t succumb to cosmic radiation.
Robots are cheaper…
Cheaper at doing what?
I have a family, so I can’t leave Earth. In my bachelor days, I would have gone, though. Provided, of course, that I get to live some place visually interesting. Maybe a cliffside dome carved into the Trench (whose name I can’t spell), or an adobe house in the foothills of Olympus Mons.
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did
And all this science I don’t understand
It’s just my job five days a week
A rocket man, a rocket man
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…
Elton John – Rocketman (3rd attempt to post this)
…poor prospects for a viable settlement because of both the deep gravity well and great distance from Earth
Let’s see… a deep gravity well makes it a poor prospect for settlement? That would make the earth a more poor prospect, wouldn’t it? Is 0.38g enough? We will only find out by doing and dying and learning to live. Perhaps life on mars will mean playing sports daily in a huge public centrifuge. We found out that long straight highways kill so had to add curves. Perhaps trains on mars will be very curvy with lots of high g turns? Or 0.38g is enough by itself and we thrive in it? Zero g hasn’t killed us, although we haven’t yet learned the way to live with it either. We need to find out by doing.
Distance (time and energy wise) means independence. For example, a planet identical to earth around another sun would be very independent of the earth. So the question is…
Does mars have the resources for a colony to survive?
Yes it does assuming two things…
1) They are given enough starting resources to exploit the local resources available to them. 2) They have absolute rights of property and contract so the incentive to exploit exists.
They don’t have to be a ragged bunch struggling to survive. They need abundance cheap electricity. Nuclear power (too cheap to meter) and no regulations… no environmental wackos need apply.
They need chemists, engineers, farmers and entrepreneurs.
…and ironworkers like those that built the Brooklyn bridge in 1883. Stand at the foot of that bridge and tell me what we can’t do. Imagine a set of WTC towers built in 0.38g. …or a space elevator.
Yes, and mars needs women.
Mars needs children. They won’t ask, can we survive? They’ll just do it.
Goff’s poll is missing something… ownership. Suppose we need a power plant. We build three. Would a power engineer go if each was given ownership of one of the plants?
Unless we hollow out an asteroid (as proposed by Dr. Jim Logan) Mars will remain the 2nd safest place in the Solar System to raise children, regardless of how lousy of a place Mars may be to raise children.
Ken,
[[[Let’s see… a deep gravity well makes it a poor prospect for settlement? That would make the earth a more poor prospect, wouldn’t it?]]]
Its Earth’s deep gravity well that is keeping us pinned to this planet. Without it the rest of the Solar System would already be ours.
So, having put all that effort into climbing out of one deep pit what rational person would want to jump into another.
It all comes down to gravity. All the evidence so far suggests that mammals can’t reproduce in the weak gravity of Mars (or the Moon). And NASA has done *nothing* to get more data.
Bill,
Actually Issac Asimov predated him on that idea by quite a bit. He covered it well in his paper.
“There’s No Place Like Spome” in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments [1], originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965
In this paper Asimov described why the interior of asteroids are the ideal home for humanity, especially when you add propulsion units to them.
BTW this paper also predates Gerard K. O’Neill thesis that the best place for human civilization to thrive is in space by several years as well. Asimov argued that although planets are OK for giving birth to intelligent species, but the ones that will go on to inherit the galaxy will evolve beyond living planets.
So the folks that are looking to go to Mars really are only going to set their decedents on a dead end road and a faith little different from those that stay on Earth.
This is also why I see the Moon as the essential next step. As a low gravity body with no atmosphere and within easy distance to Earth its the natural facilitator for enabling humanity to transition into becoming a deep space species. The techniques for living in asteroids will be learned living in the Moon.
Mars is almost ideal with respect to gravity wells. It’s low enough that reusable single stage to orbit would be a snap with LOX and any fuel, and arguably doable with monopropellant hydrazine. The combination of 1 G and our atmosphere put earth at exactly the point where reusable SSTO is virtually impossible with any known or foreseeable technology. If one had to have a home planet from which to originate space travel, Mars would be the better candidate.
Homey don’t play dat tune, the one way thing. Thought I was an explorer when younger but reality and stoginess has calcified those impulses.
I do agree with Goff’s commentors that trans oceanic sailboat adventures are one of the better earthside simulations (boredom with brief episodes of terror) since most folks don’t get the Antartic research station experience.
All the evidence so far suggests that mammals can’t reproduce in the weak gravity of Mars (or the Moon).
They got rats to give birth in zero g. Apparently, the fetuses didn’t develop a sense of up and down as the most significant problem. Given that Mars has a substantial gravity field and the most serious noted problem appears due to the absence of any sort of gravitational driven differentiation, it’s reasonable to expect the most serious problems of zero g birth would not occur in Martian gravity.
My bet is that we’ll find that rats can breed unassisted in a Mars gravity environment and over a number of generations, say about a hundred (enough to weed out some of the worst traits that threat rodent health and reproductive success), evolve into a well adapted low gravity animal. And over ten thousand generations, they’ll have made some remarkable adaptations to the raw Martian surface, not enough to live on it, but possibly either to survive and move for a few minutes or even to hibernate in a sheltered Martian environment.
Hmmm, reading that link, it’s not clear to me what they mean by “rearing fetal rats” in a microgravity environment. It might be that the fetus was allowed to develop, but the mother didn’t give birth.
Let’s see… a deep gravity well makes it a poor prospect for settlement? That would make the earth a more poor prospect, wouldn’t it?
The fact that the earth’s surface is extremely livable more than makes up for it. Still, the Earth would be a better place if its gravity well were a bit shallower — it’s deeper than it needs to be to prevent escape of the atmosphere.
Space offers economies of scale that no planet (gravity) can match. Supertankers and industrial machinery the size of asteroids, twenty kilometer long habitat production lines, huge energy systems, food production systems, computer systems, and so forth. Space offers opportunities for growth a ~billion times beyond that of planets (based on available energy and resources). A billion people living in luxury in space achieving who knows what for every one living on a stifling planet.
Setting off for the asteroid belt in large well equipped workshop/hangers intent on setting up a habitat production line using asteroid based resources is what appeals to me (pioneering engineering style :-). With large scale industrial automation, very high prosperity levels should become possible – and the technological fruits thereof.
An independent Martian state run by Cato-friendly types would be attractive.
having put all that effort into climbing out of one deep pit what rational person would want to jump into another
So Thomas, anyone that doesn’t agree with you is insane, eh? Got it.
If that next pit were identical to the earth but without humans, are you saying you wouldn’t be interested in staking a claim? Perhaps not, but would you then deny it to everyone else? That’s not rational.
Its Earth’s deep gravity well that is keeping us pinned to this planet.
We aren’t pinned. Regardless, mars at 0.38g gives options we don’t have here. Since venus is too hot, mars gives us the most earth like gravity outside a centrifuge.
The fact that the earth’s surface is extremely livable more than makes up for it.
We can make other places extremely livable too. We just need lots of cheap energy which we have once we leave the jurisdiction of the lawyers.
Ken,
I suppose planet busting appeals to those that want to relive the wild west of the TV screen, but personally I prefer to conquer the Solar System from inside an Asimov Habitat drinking my latte while watching the computer screen and letting telebotic systems do the hard work.
Pete,
[[[Setting off for the asteroid belt in large well equipped workshop/hangers intent on setting up a habitat production line using asteroid based resources is what appeals to me (pioneering engineering style 🙂 .]]]
You have the right idea. I basically see the Moon as the source of raw material for building the first workshop/hanger/home at EM L-1, then heading out into the Solar System to build more.
But rather then the asteroid belt I would head for the Saturn system. As Asimov pointed out in the story “The Martian Way”, the rings of Saturn are an ideal source of raw material. And just up the gravity well you have Titian with all the petrochemicals you could want.
And if we are really, really lucky Titian will have native microbes we could genetically engineer to process those petrochemicals for us.
I basically see the Moon as the source of raw material for building the first workshop/hanger/home at EM L-1, then heading out into the Solar System to build more.
Cheaper to actually build the first few workshops from Earth based resources, especially if one wants to eventually fly them to the asteroid belt (requiring light weight construction). The habitat shell is a small proportion of overall mass. At $200/kg a 500 ton workshop would only cost $100m.
Getting resources off the moon is actually non trivial, though probably necessary in order to test space based mining, refining and manufacturing systems prior to committing to a trip to the asteroid belt. These systems should perhaps first be developed and tested in LEO using lunar resources. A transport system using earth and lunar LH2/LOX is one perhaps near term possibility for getting extra terrestrial resources to LEO, thorium powered nuclear rockets look interesting (also for getting to the asteroid belt).
People ask, “Where’s the potential economy in space?” This line of thinking…
Getting resources off the moon is actually non trivial
…is the answer. Get enough different people in space activities and they will find a multitude of answers for what makes sense.
Choices and failures will give us the stars.
MfK said “Mars is almost ideal with respect to gravity wells. It’s low enough that reusable single stage to orbit would be a snap with LOX and any fuel, and arguably doable with monopropellant hydrazine. ”
Are you taking re-entry into account? Don’t all near-term SSTO designs benefit from the Earth’s thick atmosphere?
All near-term re-usable SSTO designs, that is.
I don’t know of any RLV that benefits from the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a performance killer on the way up, and a thermal nightmare on the way down (providing for which kills any payload). Mars’ atmosphere can’t provide all of the braking needed, even with huge parachutes, for a soft ballistic landing. But the propellant mass for touchdown is less than the thermal protection mass for an Earth-based RLV.
Pete,
[[[At $200/kg a 500 ton workshop would only cost $100m.]]]
I think you are missing a couple of zeros. The mass of the ISS is only 500 tons….
But if you able to get the launch costs that low, you could probably skip the Moon for building the workshop/habitat. But the Moon still makes a great place to develop the process for mining and processing Asteroids since the remains of the different classes of asteroids are likely to be found in abundance on the surface.
I prefer to conquer the Solar System from inside an Asimov Habitat drinking my latte while watching the computer screen and letting telebotic systems do the hard work.
I’ve read a lot of Asimov in my childhood, but wasn’t sure what an Asimov Habitat was. I vaguely remember ‘For the Birds’ which had the typical Asimov humorous twist.
Anyway, regardless of on a planet or in space, humans are going to use machines and sip lattes. Zero G is fun, but not for long term comfort (which seemed to be your theme.) A good amount of gravity (without the Coriolis effect) may just be better.
As much as I support the idea of asteroid mining, they are very far apart and without gravity to capture your vehicle raises the delta-V between them. Mars has everything you need in driving range including fuel from the air to get you there. Secondly, those telebots require humans to operate them which is limited on your habitat by volume and mass but virtually unlimited on the surface of mars.
So, what’s the score? Fun, space wins. Comfort, mars wins. Resource amount, space wins. Access to resources, mars wins. Human resources, mars wins.
We’ve talked about this before:
http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/
and
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/39664/1/05-3869.pdf
Yes, we have Bob. So what? It’s a challenge. Are you suggesting we are not up to it?
The fact is we have already successfully landed supplies on mars. We can almost, and some say it is possible, to just barely build a reusable SSTO for earth gravity. We can already handle the reentry temperatures of an earth entry which is greater than a mars entry. For mars you need a power descent because air braking is not much use.
There have been suggestions for using balloon rovers on mars. Perhaps a balloon would be a useful landing device once thrust has reduced velocity enough for it to be deployed?
Knowing how difficult the requirements are is useful. Suggesting it can’t be done, is not.
Not to forget, a space elevator may not be possible on earth, but it is absolutely possible on mars. Fortunately they are built from orbit.
Ok, I forgot about the Hypercone from the last time I read the article and it mentions the problems with the elevator.
The article makes the classic mistake of assuming you need a single heavy lift design which we don’t. They can use a larger hypercone than suggested which is also a balloon. It goes as a separate package to mars orbit where the SSTO lander meets up with it. Fuel tanks are also waiting in mars orbit.
They talk about cat 5 hurricane forces for 90 seconds. So there’s some buffeting. Sounds like a walk in the park to me.
If it’s not obvious from my post above, the lander would be suspended from the hypercone balloon so it would need a heat shield itself as well. Since you end up floating above the surface in a balloon, the final stage of landing would be quite tranquil. I would suggest cutting loose from the balloon and making a power descent from that point to make course adjustments but you could just float to the surface as well.
My point was only that Earth’s thick atmosphere makes the delta-v from orbital speeds to a soft landing easier than Mars’ thin atmosphere does. I’m unconvinced that manned re-usable SSTOs are easier on Mars than on Earth, once re-entry is taken into account. I’m certainly not saying anything about people not being up to the challenge, nor anything about mars colonization prospects, elevators, etc.
However difficult it is we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that a martian atmosphere provides benefits to landing. It would not be easier to land on mars without an atmosphere any more than it would be easier to land on earth without an atmosphere. Having some air means you don’t need as much fuel to land.
We just need to design for it.
Ken,
Asimov called them Spomes in his article, short for SPace hOMES.
“There’s No Place Like Spome” in Atmosphere in Space Cabins and Closed Environments [1], originally presented as a paper to the American Chemical Society on September 13, 1965
But I prefer the term Asimov habitats to separate them from O’Neil habitats which are just rooted in a single location and to give him credit for a great idea, building complete mobile communities to exploit the Solar System …
[[[Zero G is fun, but not for long term comfort (which seemed to be your theme.) ]]]
Who said anything about Zero G? The habitat part will be rotating to create 1G, just as on Earth, after all, how will you keep the water in your hot tub? Or the pool at the community center? 🙂
However there will be Zero G areas available for work or play as needed, plus any gravity level in between. That is the beauty of Asimov’s Spomes.