Slashdot Mirror
'Colonizing the Red Planet,' a How-To Guide
Velcroman1 writes "A manned mission to Mars would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. And one man knows how to make it a reality. In fact, he just wrote the book on it — literally. Joel Levine, senior research scientist with NASA's Langley Research Center and co-chair of NASA's Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group, just published 'The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet.' The book reads like a who's who of Mars mission science, featuring senators, astronauts, astrophysicists, geologists and more on getting to Mars, studying its atmosphere and climate, the psychological and medical effects on the crew and other details. The most interesting bit: Levine presents is a solution for funding the trip, something unprecedented for NASA: advertising. 'The suggestion is marketing to different corporations and professional sports leagues for advertising, which is something NASA never does.'"
This is a collection of papers. Levin is credited in the article for other peoples' work. But at a glance, there looks to be a lot of great work there.
Further, I don't buy the slashdot summary claim that Mars exploration or settlement (using current cost basis) can be funded solely through advertising and sponsorship. Sure if one looks at something like the Superbowl, World Cup, or the Olympics, you see many billions of dollars a year changing hands. That sort of money should be enough to run a space program. The problem is that Mars exploration doesn't have the guaranteed high interest viewership on a regular basis. Sure the actual first landing will be a big draw. But not so much the second, or third, etc. A long term program will need continuous funding over long periods of time. There's nothing to offer comparable permanent excitement to the repeated extremely popular contests of media sports.
OTOH, such a thing could be good funding for a first mission or two, especially if cost of access to space should go down considerable.
For me, the most interesting part is section 9, "Mars Base, Exploration, and Colonization of the Red Planet". Any sort of long term human activity on Mars, be it some sort of scientific mission, a new hobby for the extremely wealthy, or somebody else, is going to have to solve the sorts of problems discussed in this section.
In that short lived tv show Defying Gravity, wasn't that how they secured a lot of funding? They would shoot video of them doing something for some company and the entire world would watch it because it was the most amazing mission the world had ever seen. Some people might consider that selling out the mission or the science. However, I say better to get there sometime in the next two decades riding on the collective backs of the commercial industry then get there sometime next century with the "no-strings attached" money of people's collective good will. We'll get there sooner this way, and we can all benefit from the resulting advances in knowledge and science.
Really, what's on Mars that can't be done more cheaply by building near earth orbital environments?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
The few ones going to Mars will do it at the expense of the entire living humans left back with their problems and much less ressources to solve them.
Fair trade. Keep in mind that the humans left on Earth have serious problems because they don't attempt to solve them, not because they don't have the resources to solve them.
I know this is going to be a hugely unpopular opinion on Slashdot, but has anyone actually made a decent argument to answer why, instead of how? I've never heard one. People usually just stare at me, when I ask, then say something akin to, "Because it's there." or "You weren't alive when we landed on the moon. You just don't understand." Occasionally I hear something like, "It's an investment in science (or the tech industry)," which is much better than "you just don't get it", but still hardly a winning argument, in my opinion. I'm not against space travel, but I'd like to see some compelling arguments, rather than nerd rage.
And, yes, maybe I would have said the same thing about the European obsession with exploring the New World. So what? What good idea has ever suffered from a little debate?
for a number of reasons, not least of which its "fake" magnetosphere, which mars does not have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus#Induced_magnetosphere
also note:
cloud city anyone?
living chambers or entire cities, pressurized to earth-friendly atmospherics, floating like balloons. with human-friendly gravity and a good-enough magnetosphere, and, on top of the clouds, a much nicer temperature (although the venusian day > venusian year! so you'd have a hot and cold cycle that's pretty dramatic)
still, all this points to life above the venusian clouds as something better than mars. colonial life, floating on the venusian cloudtops. on a number of merits, compared to mars, with much less atmosphere, no magnetosphere and paltry gravity to offer... venus comes out the superior choice. and then there's the closer solar proximity (power source anyone?)
one drawback to venus is it seems to boiled off most of its hydrogen. but mars seems to have done that too, so the deficiency is simply a problem with both mars and venus
overall, venus is the future folks, not mars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that various powerful organizations, not all of them governments, can be counted on to stake out turf and use this for their own advantage. But
A.) There are plenty of powers other than corporations.
B.) Staking out turf doesn't need to be zero-sum or destructive. At least not for the next few decades.
There's no reason that Wisconsin can't arrange to send Official Wisconsin Cheese and Salmon to be used by Mars settlers in return for an endorsement. And U. W. has more than enough of a space science program to get a fifty kilo payload to mars orbit as long as it can survive slow/frugal trajectories and launch. Same for an Official UCLA remote filming rig. Which could fight for better coverage with ILM and Digital Domain roving camera rigs. Or New Zealand Wool Mission staff sweaters. And so on.
And now that we have a version of IP 6.0 that works in space, there's no reason we can't set up shared parking orbits with traffic control, and shared taxiing from orbit, allowing portioned out tasks to do this in ways that don't have to be predatory.
And oh by the way, lots of that kind of stuff can get going with the tech that we have right now.
http://streetcarstospaceships.typepad.com/s2s/2008/09/no-more-waiting-lets-start-sending-supplies-to-mars-now.html
Colony should be able to sustain itself someday. Top temperature of -5 C does not look like some place that can sustain people from planet Earth. They might be able spend some time there, but they won't last for long without supplies coming from Earth. I am even not sure if Mars atmospheric pressure level allows humans to breath without aids. Forget all Sci-Fi movies that you saw and look for better planet.
Real estate, yes, but I suspect at some point in the next couple of hundred years (if not sooner) we're going to start running up against some pretty major resource walls. Remember, the early colonization efforts by the Europeans had little to do with colonization itself, and everything to do with making money. It's little wonder that the early colonization efforts were the founding corporate enterprises.
I can't imagine anyone seriously wanting to live on Mars, the Moon, or anywhere else out there. But at some point we'll want to start eating the resources out there; the metals, the minerals, the huge amount of hydrocarbons, and that's going to mean having the technological means to go get them. I rather look at this period as something like the Portuguese explorations of the African coast in early and mid 15th century; though clearly not very profitable.
The only way we're ever going to do manned missions beyond near Earth orbit as a continuous and expanding venture, and that's profit. Idealism is a Golden Age SF-Star Trek notion, and not one you can sustain something as complex and expensive as space travel on. At some point, whether because we figure out some way of getting into space and to other planets for cheap or because of some sort of resource scarcity here on Earth, it's going to have to pay for itself, much as the European colonies in the New World ultimately had to be able to feed and clothe themselves, to provide the core resources and technologies to keep the people breathing. If you don't have that, then it's a no go.
It isn't going to happen in my life time. If I'm really lucky, maybe I'll see the first manned mission to Mars, but beyond that, I'll wager we're probably looking at another hundred years or more before the technology and the economic attractiveness of space create a point at which manned interplanetary travel and colonization (and I use that word hesitantly, I really don't foresee some future Pilgrims founding a colony out there, it will be commercial or nationalistic interests, not idealistic ventures) become feasible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.