Waitbutwhy's blog on SpaceX, Mars and the future

[Nibb31]

And it would have happened had they been allowed to continue after Apollo 17.

From what we know now about Mars and with 1970's technology, I really doubt that.

[DBowman]

Vaults seem like an 'emergency time capsule' or Noah's Ark sort of solution. They have some disadvantages:

• they can be de-funded because they seem useless to some people
  
• people aren't going to live in them 'until they have to' and they can miss-judge that and oops no ark
  
• microbes live way down in the lithosphere, the bio containment might not be good enough
  
• the chosen few might bring the bio hazard / grey goo (figurative) down with them
  
• it might be a 'people problem' - Arks wouldn't have helped the Romans vs. Vandals
  
• some disasters might be centuries before the vaults can be opened?
  

Expanding into space seems much more robust because it's just civilization spread out:

• the insurance comes for free as a bonus side effect - no one ( except congress ) de-funds their own civilization.
  
• I think in a lot of ways off Earth is a better and more natural place for a large industrial civilization. The sunlit reef filled shallows vs a thermal vent community.
  

It would be good to see some real cost estimates for constructing and expanding vault communities / making vault civilizations. How do they even expand? Where do they put the stuff they removed to 'make more space'? The other place people tend to bring up is 'the bottom of the Ocean'. It takes a lot of material to keep 400-1000 atmospheres out, so far the biggest thing to go that deep is smaller than a mercury capsule. It might not be as cheap and easy as people seem to think to scale up a civilization 'down there'.

[PB666]

I follow this train of thought but I don't believe justidutch recommended going *now* but rather being more enthusiastic; like funding it more and trying to come up with a solid plan. Can someone here enlighten us on how Mars could be terraformed over a long time span? Because if that is possible even if remotely so with our current technology we should start soon.

No it is not possible, the gravity is too weak and the level of sunlight is too small. Dig down 150 miles, create a hole that gas sinks into use solar panels too provide power for Leds. then place CO2 tolerant microbes and let them make O2. Need a methane/Co2 separater so that you can burn off the methane.

Thats as far as you can go, eventually the atmosphere will thin cause it will all sink in the little holes you create.

[ChrisSpace]

- Grey goo doesn't exist. There's no point in paying insurance for threats that don't exist.

- Some would be pulverized. Some would survive. You would still save orders of magnitude more lives than a space colony.

- Mars will never be more hospitable than a scorched Earth. A half-destroyed Earth will still have some sort of atmosphere that you can filter, water that you can recycle, and more wind and solar power than Mars will ever have.

- Mars has less sunlight for solar power.

- What useful resources does Mars have that the Earth doesn't?

- What's more appealing, living underground on Earth with the hope of coming out one day for some fresh air and rain, or living underground on Mars to protect from the radiation, the cold, and the toxic atmosphere.

- Still, there are many ways super-tech civilization could physically destroy it's planet.

- A strong enough asteroid impact would pulverize every part of the Earth's structure.

- You don't really get what i'm saying, do you?

- Less sunlight =/= No sunlight. And to most plants the difference could be manageable.

- It's not a matter of 'Mars has X but Earth doesn't', it's a matter of 'Earth used to have X until we used it all up, and now we don't have enough X to go into space anymore, even though Mars has plenty of X, meaning Mars colonies can continue to expand into space.'

- You are making assumptions on what the colony will look like. It could perhaps be one of those dome things with buildings and trees and stuff inside. The technology already exists to build such a dome using the resources on Mars, and one that is radiation-proof as well.

[Nibb31]

- Still, there are many ways super-tech civilization could physically destroy it's planet.

- A strong enough asteroid impact would pulverize every part of the Earth's structure.

Which is an inexistant threat. We have a pretty good grasp on asteroids that are large enough to do that sort of damage. Nothing has totally pulverized the Earth over the last 2 billion years. It's rather unlikely that something appears out of the blue in the next few thousand hundred years.

- Less sunlight =/= No sunlight. And to most plants the difference could be manageable.

You can put UV lamps underground. My point is that if you have the technology to

- It's not a matter of 'Mars has X but Earth doesn't', it's a matter of 'Earth used to have X until we used it all up, and now we don't have enough X to go into space anymore, even though Mars has plenty of X, meaning Mars colonies can continue to expand into space.'

But what vital resource will we have used up that is abundant on Mars and that we cannot extract or recycle from Earth?

- You are making assumptions on what the colony will look like. It could perhaps be one of those dome things with buildings and trees and stuff inside. The technology already exists to build such a dome using the resources on Mars, and one that is radiation-proof as well.

Glass don't shield cosmic rays very well and they are fragile. A single leak and everyone dies. My point is that whatever closed-loop life support habitat you can build on Mars would be much easier to just deploy on Earth. If you could land the infrastructure for manufacturing glass domes on Mars, then you could bury a similar infrastructure in a safe place on Earth. If you can build solar-powered hydroponic farms on Mars, then you can build them on Earth.

But we're really going off topic here. The point isn't how to design an underground bunker. The point is that if your goal is to establish a life insurance for mankind, there are cheaper, safer, and more efficient ways of doing it than colonizing Mars if you have the technology to do that. Just about every technology that you can think of for building a self-sufficient shelter on Mars could also be applied to building a self-sufficient shelter on Earth without the additional cost and complexity of going to Mars.

Ralathon hit the nail on the head with the second post in this thread. When you are purchasing insurance, you get coverage for the reasonable risks. Your not going to spend everything you've got for a super insurance that covers the most improbable events. Also, insurances aren't infallible, and the survivability of a Mars colony, however self-sufficient, is always going to be more fragile than simply having people spread out over the Earth. What if your Mars colony gets hit by an asteroid a week after the Earth is destroyed? What if the destruction of Earth happens before your colony becomes self sufficient? What if an overlooked technical failure kills everyone on Mars? What if your plants get a disease and die? The odds of that happening are much greater than the Earth being pulverized by a freak asteroid.

Edited August 19, 2015 by Nibb31

[RainDreamer]

I think the idea is this:

It is a fact that, at one point, we won't be able to live on Earth any more, no matter what we do. Either we run out of resources, we screwed our earth beyond repair, the sun dies, etc. It may take millennia, or even longer, but nothing last forever. We will have to figure out a way to go to the star if we want our species to continue beyond that point.

Some people, like Musk, believes that we should start doing that figuring thing sooner rather than later, and is pushing for it. Mars is currently the perfect place for us to do our trial run and see if we can eventually move out from our home and find a way to thrive on other planets, using our current technology. Once we get that down, we are basically safe to move away from Earth any time we like and live amongst the stars if something horrible happen, and the technology will keep advancing from there to be even more efficient. We don't want our tech to fail at the last minute when the life of our species rest on it, after all, so extensive testing will be required.

[Bill Phil]

I think the idea is this:

It is a fact that, at one point, we won't be able to live on Earth any more, no matter what we do. Either we run out of resources, we screwed our earth beyond repair, the sun dies, etc. It may take millennia, or even longer, but nothing last forever. We will have to figure out a way to go to the star if we want our species to continue beyond that point.

Some people, like Musk, believes that we should start doing that figuring thing sooner rather than later, and is pushing for it. Mars is currently the perfect place for us to do our trial run and see if we can eventually move out from our home and find a way to thrive on other planets, using our current technology. Once we get that down, we are basically safe to move away from Earth any time we like and live amongst the stars if something horrible happen, and the technology will keep advancing from there to be even more efficient. We don't want our tech to fail at the last minute when the life of our species rest on it, after all, so extensive testing will be required.

Except that gravity wells make things cost energy. Lots of energy. Using the resources from Near Earth Asteroids would allow us to construct large colonies in space. Colonies that may be more expensive initially than a Mars colony, but are ultimately more efficient.

[DBowman]

Which is an inexistant threat. We have a pretty good grasp on asteroids that are large enough to do that sort of damage. Nothing has totally pulverized the Earth over the last 2 billion years. It's rather unlikely that something appears out of the blue in the next few thousand hundred years.

5 to 20 major extinction events in the last 530 million years - something really bad is unlikely in the next few thousand years, but certain in the long run.

My point is that whatever closed-loop life support habitat you can build on Mars would be much easier to just deploy on Earth. If you could land the infrastructure for manufacturing glass domes on Mars, then you could bury a similar infrastructure in a safe place on Earth. If you can build solar-powered hydroponic farms on Mars, then you can build them on Earth.

What you say is true - but they say 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' not 'wrap some of your eggs up' because there is the risk of 'dropping the basket'.

If you look at history all civilizations fall, often from self inflicted wounds. So far that's not been 'too bad' because there was always another to pick up the torch, but today it's all tightly integrated - there is no one else to pick up the torch. Further more we have picked all the low hanging fruit in terms of mine-able resources etc, it would be much more difficult to 'start over'.

[Ralathon]

5 to 20 major extinction events in the last 530 million years - something really bad is unlikely in the next few thousand years, but certain in the long run.

What you say is true - but they say 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' not 'wrap some of your eggs up' because there is the risk of 'dropping the basket'.

If you look at history all civilizations fall, often from self inflicted wounds. So far that's not been 'too bad' because there was always another to pick up the torch, but today it's all tightly integrated - there is no one else to pick up the torch. Further more we have picked all the low hanging fruit in terms of mine-able resources etc, it would be much more difficult to 'start over'.

Nobody is saying that we shouldn't do anything to prevent the collapse of our civilization. The argument is whether Mars is a cost effective way of doing so.

We will have to leave the earth at some point in the future. In the end the sun will go nova, and our distant descendants will have to gtfo. But we aren't in a hurry to do so. As you said, it's unlikely that anything really unsurvivably bad is going to happen in the next few thousand years. So we can afford to wait a century or 2 before colonizing Mars.

[Nibb31]

5 to 20 major extinction events in the last 530 million years - something really bad is unlikely in the next few thousand years, but certain in the long run.

Extinction events don't mean that the Earth is pulverized. It means that a large number of species die off over a period that ranges from a few years to several thousand years. It also means that a large number of species survive and thrive in the end. With our adaptability and our knowledge, I'm pretty sure our species could survive any those events. I'm not saying it would be a walk in the park, but even if we lose 99.9% of the world population, we would still be millions.

Many scientists consider that we are in the middle of the sixth major extinction, and we are the cause of it. If you push the reasoning to its extreme and if you consider that life on Earth is worth preserving, then get rid of the humans. Don't save them. I'm not going there though...

What you say is true - but they say 'don't put all your eggs in one basket' not 'wrap some of your eggs up' because there is the risk of 'dropping the basket'.

But if you have only one basket, you do your best. The Earth is the only habitable place that we've got. We can visit the Moon or Mars, just like we can visit the Ocean floors or Mont Everest, but we can't live there permanently because the conditions are too extreme. There simply is no point.

Until science fiction comes true (hint: it never does), we are not going to be terraforming Mars and turning it into a second Earth. It will remain an extreme environment: extreme cold, unbreathable atmosphere, toxic, and hampered with cosmic radiation and low gravity.

[Bill Phil]

Nibb31, Science Fiction has come true. Going to the Moon, submarines that use electricity, and other examples I forgot.

[Mazon Del]

Human civilization, and thus effectively humanity itself, is quite a fragile beast. The sheer amount of infrastructure it takes to support a single human life is staggering, and it doesn't take that much effort to disrupt the infrastructure enough to begin having effects on people. The question about cost-effectiveness of one vs the other is in some ways almost a fallacy, if only because the biggest advantage that a Mars colony gets (being on a separate planet and thus completely disconnected from catastrophe's on Earth) is kind of an incalculable advantage. It has exactly as much worth as you personally choose to assign to it. But let me put it this way. With the redundancy of having a colony on Mars vs vaults on Earth is this. If an incident happens that destroys the Earth based ability to live, Mars is fine. If an incident happens that destroys the Mars based ability to live, Earth is fine. If an incident happens that destroys the vault based ability to live...everything is dead.

And no, just "burying the vaults so deep it would....." is not really a valid response, once you get below a certain rather shallow depth, building anything on the scale you'd need to ensure humanities survival quickly becomes as expensive if not more so than setting things up on Mars.

Until science fiction comes true (hint: it never does)

Yes, let me agree with your statement through a tiny device made of precious metals from all over the world, machined at the nano-meter scale to provide me with more than enough processing power to run a space program, that connects me instantly to the infinite repository of human knowledge we are now conversing on, without using any wires, as I lean against my electric car charging in mere minutes with more electricity than many humans have used in their entire lives, on my way to the airport to fly through the air at 500 miles per hour in a 110,000 lbs metal machine whose engines have pieces moving around faster than the speed of sound, that will more likely than not be flown primarily by an artificial intelligence that could probably replace the crew if we really wanted to do so, so I can travel a distance in mere hours that 99% of humanity historically has never traveled, just so I can spend some time with family and do hikes in the mountains before heading back to work where I build sensor systems capable of detecting thousands of craft of all sizes from absurdly ridiculous ranges to feed this information through a satellite communications network so that some fancy suited guy I've never met can decide if it's worth detonating the planet or not while shouting "MURICA!" to make a point, while leaving 6 people flying around in a 990,000 lbs tin can the size of a football field at a speed of 17,000 mph and an altitude of 256 miles to wonder what those bright lights were and why nobody is talking to them anymore. Thank god science fiction never comes true, or we'd really be in for it.

[RainDreamer]

Give it a few thousand years. We have time to make science fiction stops being fiction, at the current rate of technological development.

[Rakaydos]

As I read the article, the idea is "If he builds it, they will come"

Mars 1 was a scam. But Elon Musk is making it so MArs 2 doesnt have to be. The first wave, like mars 1, will have to sell their life posessions to afford a ticket, but there are people who will buy those tickets anyway, and THEY are the buisnes model, just like the Tesla Roadster was only affordable by Ferarri people before the Model S rolled around. But like Tesla, profits on the super-elite deluxe package go towards making a more affordable version, along with increasing ecnomies of scale in a positive feedback loop.

Also, "overcharge 1st class passangers to subsidize coach" was a serious suggestion, that technically "brings down ticket price" for ecommy seating, at least, without any technical breakthroughs whatsoever, just ecomomic min-maxxing.

[Kryten]

Mars 1 was a scam. But Elon Musk is making it so MArs 2 doesnt have to be. The first wave, like mars 1, will have to sell their life posessions to afford a ticket, but there are people who will buy those tickets anyway, and THEY are the buisnes model, just like the Tesla Roadster was only affordable by Ferarri people before the Model S rolled around.

Mars One had less than 3000 applicants, at least to the point of actually handing over the application fee; and that was at most 75 US dollars (varying by country). So that business model of yours looks just a tad shaky.

Edited August 20, 2015 by Kryten

[Rakaydos]

that's cause Mars 1 was a scam, and anyone could tell.

By the time SpaceX is offering tickets, they'll already have regular cargo flights for the initial mars base setup, and people will take it seriously.

[Mazon Del]

Mars One started off decently enough, the first thing in their favor was that they admitted that nobody on the small project just yet had any experience with anything related to rocketry. They had a very low level beginnings of a plan, mostly saying "We'll just re-use what others made. Our habitat modules for the journey will be copies of already R&Ded ISS modules. We'll use the Falcon Heavy. Etc". And the $45 fee (For those in the US) was basically a "Kickstarter". Now, for people as rich as those guys, it was theoretically not hilariously necessary.

But, let's not jump on the "Hate Mars One!" bandwagon. There are threads already devoted for that.

Musk's situation is a bit different. Chances are pretty good that while he will let some people buy seats on the trip to Mars, he'll have to fill most of the seats himself (remember, the launcher holds 100 people). While I'd intend to try and snag a seat myself, we'll see where things go.

[Nibb31]

Musk's situation is a bit different. Chances are pretty good that while he will let some people buy seats on the trip to Mars, he'll have to fill most of the seats himself (remember, the launcher holds 100 people). While I'd intend to try and snag a seat myself, we'll see where things go.

The article is pretty clear about Musk's intentions to sell tickets for Mars at $500,000.

As I explained before, the Venn diagram showing the intersection of people who are willing to leave everything behind, who can afford a $500,000 ticket, and who have skills that can be useful for jump starting a colony isn't going to make a huge waiting list.

[Mazon Del]

Yes Musk intends to sell the tickets to Mars for half a million as that is the most cost sustaining way of doing things, but again, he cares more about getting the colony than profit. There is likely to be some ratio of volunteers to empty seats vs population on Mars where he just starts paying himself.

[Rakaydos]

Heck, the first flight is probably going to be all trained astronauts from all the space agencies, collectively splitting the bill.

[FishInferno]

Heck, the first flight is probably going to be all trained astronauts from all the space agencies, collectively splitting the bill.

It will probably be astronauts that SpaceX hires themselves, unless NASA decides to ditch the SLS and help SpaceX instead.

[Bill Phil]

It will probably be astronauts that SpaceX hires themselves, unless NASA decides to ditch the SLS and help SpaceX instead.

Ahh, but NASA can't decide that.

[Kryten]

Do you people actually believe this stuff? It gets hard to tell sometimes.

[Rakaydos]

What's not to believe? that a rich guy has a dream? That he has an idea how to make it happen? that he has a financial plan to pay for it?

Or is it that someone would pursue such a financially and scientifically irresponcable goal as a manned mars mission in the first place?

[FishInferno]

Do you people actually believe this stuff?

Yes. I do. I believe that SpaceX is our best shot at Mars, because they have the money (unlike Mars One), but more importantly, they have a true vision (unlike NASA).