Comment by johnea
1 day ago
And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go to Mars, AT ALL.
This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss.
What would be the point?
If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year.
If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot closer.
The post at the top of this thread is correct in saying the logistics of supporting a colony on Mars would take decades, and cost billions (at least).
I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.
> there's no reason the trip can't be one-way
If the crew includes elon, I am actually in favor of this...
Humans are better at exploring and doing science than rovers, they could get things done a lot quicker and better. They can repair things and are very adaptable. A mission to spend 6 months on the surface would be great. Perhaps not worth the risk and expense though.
And Zeroly, there's absolutely 0 reason for people to go west, AT ALL
- Portugal, 1490
there were lots of reasons to go west, since Europe was desperate and starved for spices and goods from the Silk Road.
the Ottomans had cut them off following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or where they didn't they taxed the hell out of them).
they knew for sure there was good stuff over there, and just wanted a new way there.
we know for sure that Mars is blasted, toxic, rock ball with less metal than Earth. what great and grand spices will future explorers be returning with? the Portuguese could prove that nutmeg and silk existed...
The explorers were seeking new trade routes with clear routes economic purpose.
Except that the Americas were already inhabited prior to 1490 because they were in fact relatively easily reachable at an earlier point in history and extremely habitable. Mars by contrast is an environment that is actively hostile to life. Even the dust is lethal. And you're so far away from the rest of humanity you can only get resupplies every few years. The Americas had water, soil, edible plants and animals - and practically infinite amounts of breathable air. If you want to go homestead on Mars, dysentery is going to be the least of your worries.
> I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.
Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Consider all the developments from the Apollo program. This level of pessimism always shocks me, shouldn’t we rise to the challenge?
A rover is expendable, a human much less so. The PR cost of having a human smash into the surface of Mars the way it happened with a rover would easily outweigh the PR boost of having a human successfully land on Mars. And even if we managed to actually land someone, they'd most likely die there before we could bring them back.
A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.
It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.
I agree that automation and robots are a good proxy for exploration. And yes it will be tough. That won't stop people from trying.
PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.
There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.