Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million People On Mars To Safeguard Humanity
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk's ambitions for SpaceX keep getting bigger. First he wanted to make the trip to Mars affordable, then he wanted to establish a city-sized colony, and now he's got his eye on the future of humanity. Musk says we need a million people on Mars to form a "sustainable, genetically diverse civilization" that can survive as humanity's insurance policy. He continued, "Even at a million, you're really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil." How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved. "Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we're talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship."
Get your ass to mars.
There is no way to "safeguard humanity" (at least in a physical sense). It's called "entropy".
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
on the first bitcoin atm and exchange on mars!
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
I suppose the number of trips to deliver a million humans to the Red Planet could be reduced if they could be convinced to breed once they arrive there.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
New Australia?
Did we abandon terraforming? I know it takes time but it takes away many problems.
AI will take over, it's the next step of evolution. Humans are delicate meatbags, and need to step aside.
The only way such a colony could be sustainable would be if it mined Mars and it's moons for materials to construct most things. There is no way a Mars colony that depends on Earth cargo for raw materials will be sustainable.
Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million Lawyers On Mars To Safeguard Humanity
There, fixed that for you.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Musk says we need a million people on Mars to form a "sustainable, genetically diverse civilization" that can survive as humanity's insurance policy.
So that also means many races and ethnic groups.
He continued, "Even at a million, you're really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person
Ah wait...
Or, you know, send robots and a small number of people to automate the mining and construction areas to make space for people.
Mars is a planet like any other, all the useful stuff is just under ground and needs to be mined out.
Once all the surface crap has been moved out of the way, it can be used like Earth pretty easily.
Aquaponics farms would take place of ground farms and most meat.
Then later on as you get more people, you could transport some chickens over, useful for eggs, chickens and feathers.
Then take it from there.
But until a stable foundation is there, no casual non-industrial working types should be going there at all.
And robotics is the only way it will be feasible in any reasonable timescale.
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Why presume all material has to be taken by spaceship? Plants are the natural equivalent of 3d printers, self replicating producing various usable materials converting present raw materials into more complex materials. They can provide food, O2, building materials and so on. You thus send a hypothetical team of 100 including a whole mess of botanists and biologists who breed plants to work with native conditions to provide what materials are needed. Then once the colony is self sustaining you ship up the next batch of people.
Also, given the right percentage of various genes, humans tend to be self replicating, to get 1 million people on mars does not require taking 1 million people to mars, just ad procreation and child rearing to the job description for the emigrants.
f you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people.
No. You'd store their DNA, ship that and "grow" people after it arrives. And after the robots have spent the time necessary building the infrastructure, making it habitable and amassing the minerals, water, gases and power generation needed to sustain the colony.
The only problem would be getting the robots to let go of control, once the humans arrive.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm a big admirer of Mr Musk. He is doing some big plays and largely pulling them off at the moment. However, I still can't buy a reasonably priced electric car, and Richard Branson hasn't even gotten his rocket tourist joyride thing going yet. So while it would be cool if I could ride a Space X rocket around the solar system and travel in vacuum tubes along the West Coast, can we please just focus on getting the car thing sorted out first before we all blast off.
No it is easy.
First: Stop wasting all the materials that we currently launch then abandon. (Fuel tanks etc.)
Second: Build a cheap big low pressurized work hangar in orbit.
Third: Same on moon.
Fourth: Well we are well into 2050 by now so some one else can think how since I'm dead.
Elon Musk is no doubt a first rate businessperson, but he is not a scientist, and it's clear his administrative successes have gone to his head. In a world where people like him are put high on a pedestal, it's inevitable that people such as him will begin to confuse their dreams with reality.
You know a good way of safeguarding humanity? Getting rid of the competitive, cut-throat, short-termist, game-based system that allowed him to rise way above those actually doing the work. The same belligerent mindset which could eradicate civilisation on earth would make a snack of a fragile Mars colony. In a world where we hear "holocaust" and think Final Solution or Stalin in Ukraine rather than the Great Famine of India or the massacre of Native Americans, it's going to be harder to create a balanced system.
He's right that we need to get populations of humans off this rock if the species is going to survive. Mars might be a good first step, but we need to think about more distance, Mars is too close. The gamma ray burst that kills off life on earth would just as easily kill everyone on Mars. If the problem was a wandering neutron star it's going to savage everything in its path.
We need to think about sending generational ships into space. Maybe we can't do it right now, but we should be working toward that goal. Perhaps Musk is thinking that generational ships are too big of a step with current technology and that we need to get comfortable spending longer times in space before aiming higher.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So how much taxpayer money are you asking for Mr. Musk? What a huckster.
Don't forget technology advancements.
Seriously! While it would be a fun place to visit what nutter would ever want to live there permantly? No life, no trees, no grass. You whole life would be like living in an apartment building that you could never leave.
The B ark?
Mars does not have a molten iron core, and hence doesn't have the cool magnetic field that earth does. That magnetic field does a LOT to protect our atmosphere from getting stripped off, not to mention protecting us from radiation.
Screw Mars. Spend all that money on making it nice HERE. We have the means. We have the tech. We could have a star trek utopia right here... Free education, opportunity through small businesses, cheap housing, plentiful energy. We could have all that right here if we just put a smidge of effort into it.
Take all that money and just pay off 5% of the population's houses. Those people, now freed from having to grind on the treadmill for their housing, could start small businesses... circulating money in the economy. It doesn't need to be much. Start a taco truck... Employ a few people... We'd have zero unemployment and a lot more happiness. The economic repercussions would be staggering.
A lot of human suffering is because a few assholes ruin it for the rest of us. How about we fix THAT? Screw mars...
Evolution is still happening. There was no humanity a million years ago, and there won't be one in another million, Mars or no. Can we stop with this pseudo-religious "species salvation" crap already? They're rockets, metal tubes filled with kerosene. That's all. No one's going anywhere.
I will stay here on the Green Hills of Earth
1 millon is a very big number. Mankind odds for the future could be vastly improved if we send maybe 1000 (specific) people to Mars. Or to the bottom of the sea, or maybe just sacrifice them in a volcano.
Seriously, for sending big amounts of people and materials elsewhere you need more than rockets, maybe an space elevator, or a cheaper/more efficient way to send big loads to space (there are several alternatives for non-rocket spacelaunch)
Send all them lawyers.. Humanity will be safe
Really, we need to make better robots that can build an industrial mining complex, then take a few people for publicity and shit. Maybe put a mars space station to control robots closer, because of the speed of light and shit. Unless we find a way to make the life in mars as good as here, or we find that an unavoidable asteroid is coming towards us, there is no reason to put humans in mars, robots are up to the task.
And if you pick the right million people to send there, it's a win-win situation! I'm not sure that it would be really ethical to send one million bankster and lawyers to Mars though. At least from the Martians standpoint.
Well just F up that planet too.
The concept of treating planets as disposable vessels for humans to be sucked dry and then we move on basically makes us a cancer.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I just realized that by sending up more than a handful of nationally picked personnel, would require some sort of rule of law. Well, who will determine this? Should the Martian follow their "Launching states" laws? Their nationalities laws? What happens when another country, with their own culture and laws, sends out their own 1 million people? Will we need to start dividing Mars up into counties already?
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
boycott the lizards and human/alien hybrids! (you know who you are)
Wait few decades and scientist will finally have figured how how to scale photon teleportation to macro scale and we only need one rocket to mars. To establish first base colony with teleport station and power to run it...
Mars does not have a molten iron core, and hence doesn't have the cool magnetic field that earth does.
Spouting some bullshit during my lunchtime - would it be possible to make the core molten and thus spin up a magnetosphere by creating an artificial moon?
I'm thinking keep firing asteroids into the necessary orbit until you've accrued enough mass.
Obviously not a "done this week" project just a curious thought experiment.
We will need a few space elevators to get off of the Earth before this would be realistic.
You would also need to figure out how to create a giant magnetic field around Mars to protect from radiation and solar wind.
I still think we need to consider other places still.
As I discussed here (~25years ago): http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction. "
And: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
And here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
But many others have discussed similar things, so just another voice in the choir in that sense. If Musk really reflects on these issues (other than being another Mars fanboy) he will see that there are many possible avenues to decentralization and resiliency, of which Mars is just one. As we gain knowledge and experience in creating such systems, then we can disperse farther and farther to deal with bigger and bigger possible disasters (including the ones you point out about gamma ray burst or wandering neutron stars).
More ideas in that direction: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
And by others:
http://www.luf.org/
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Mai...
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
http://openluna.org/
Also something I've been involved with, but has since became more broadly "Open Manufacturing" and the maker movement: http://openvirgle.net/
So, generation ships etc. are interesting ideas, and they all fit into a large general picture of possibilities.
Still, for all that, making the Earth work well for most everyone (zero emissions cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, better healthcare and nutrition, a global basic income, better education for all, indoor agriculture, new power sources like dirt cheap solar and hot and cold fusion, and so on) is a good first step towards knowing how to live in space, especially given we are already on what Bucky Fuller called "Spaceship Earth". So, I see no big incompatibility between trying to make the Earth work for everyone and preparing for a future where there are quadrillions of people living in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond -- perhaps even into other dimensions and realities and simulations? Of course, there are philosophical issues still about all this about meanings in life and so on.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just have sex like crazy and reproduce.
Humans will evolve on Mars into some other specie. I agree in principle that we have to get off this rock if civilization is to survive, but to expect that humans will continue being humans on another planet somewhere is simply naive.
Perhaps we come up with something to make them comfortable with their poor position in life, like a promise of life after death with virgins on top.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Machines surveying the landscape and building semi-subterranean structures. Have sites near the polar ice caps to tap the water trapped there and wind power and geothermal taps to power the whole process. All of this could happen long before the first humans step foot on the planet.
Despite being raised on a diet of inter-galactic sci-fi, I don't believe we will ever escape our gravity well in any numbers. There are only two things that get humans worked up - short term profit and religion. One won't motive space travel. And if the other does, bog help us.
So now we have here on /. David Cammeron and Elon Musk right near each other today and I must say I have not seen a better contrast manifesting here that would provoke such a despair/hope emotions in me from one look on my monitor.
Put a million people on Mars with no oil, and what are they going to do? That's right -- they'll attack Earth to get our oil! No thanks, Elon.
I, for one, will *not* welcome our new Martian overlords.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
As the subject says!
Screw Mars. Spend all that money on making it nice HERE. We have the means. We have the tech. We could have a star trek utopia right here... Free education, opportunity through small businesses, cheap housing, plentiful energy. We could have all that right here if we just put a smidge of effort into it.
Well, we could do that too.
But us fucking up the planet isn't the only scenario that might cause planetary extinction. Do you remember what killed off the dinsaurs?
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Forget about sanitizing our spaceships - it proves very little. Spread life around the galaxy! It is our duty.
Hauling 1M bodies to Mars is not an efficient way to populate the planet. Unless and until we have a reliable and cost effective artificial womb, the limiting factor is the ability to have babies. So we should start with, say, 100 very intelligent and skilled, and physically capable women. Each of them should be inpregnated on Mars with frozen, fertilized ova from a stock representing the genetic diversity of Earth. Did I mention that the ova should all be females? So assuming that each woman can bear 7 children in her lifetime (a reasonable average based on good medical care and historic norms) and that the generation time is 20 years, it would take about 125 years to reach a population of 1 million. During that 125 year period the women would be busy building a modern civilization while also devoting a major portion of their time ot childcare. Constant resupply of food and manufactured products would have to be provided from Earth. Oh, and I guess they could have a few males around... you know... for entertainment.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Oxygen. Duhhh!
He's not on crack, he's being sponsored by the US government. It is a lot more powerful than crack. Also, who's "we"?
Insurance policy for the human race? If the human race is so destructive of its environment and self and pretty much everything else it comes in contact with, 1/ why is that not simply going to happen again on Mars? 2/ If history is any indicator, does the human race warrant being preserved? An alien civilisation would view us as a cancerous blot on the universe.
On the one hand, I think his number is off, or at least lacking detail. There's significant evidence that around 100k years ago humanity went through a population bottleneck of around 10k humans, so that seems like compelling evidence that a 10k population at least can contain sufficient genetic diversity to allow a species similar to humanity to survive. If you need a million hands to do work, then you could have those 10k people generate offspring, or you could augment their productivity by a factor of 100, or a combination of both, but as for moving people (or genes) from Earth to Mars, you should be able to get away with only moving 10k and still have at least a reasonable chance of being a back-up to our one planet egg basket.
Then there's the idea of needing to send 100k ships to Mars. Unless you're just swimming in delta V, then you should probably launch ships at or near the transfer windows that happen every 26 months. If you're sending a ship every window, then those 100k ships will take over 200 thousand years. A lot can happen in 200,000 years. Like really, a whole lot. If you're sending 1000 ships every launch window, economies of scale work really well for orbital transfers, and you'd be really a lot better off sending a ship 1000 times bigger. It'd still take 200 years, which is still a long time, but not nearly as long as 200,000. And if you only need 10k people, you could send 1000 at a time for the next 20 years, which while still seeming extremely optimistic, at least sounds within some bounds of rationality.
But maybe it's harder to get people interested in reasonable and achievable, but difficult goals than it is to get them excited about the unrealistic monumental ones. Sitting on the couch watching National Geographic, it's a lot more fun to say "I could totally go and climb Mt. Everest myself, I should do that!" than it is to get off the couch and go jogging for 15 minutes.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
That's just not a good disaster recovery plan at all. Everybody knows you don't keep your offsite backups in the same neighborhood.
The number of trips to populate is likely to be somewhat smaller if you send men and women who can reproduce. Those offspring can reproduce (assuming there are both m/f offspring) after 18-20 years. And, of course, people will die of natural and unnatural causes. What will the average lifespan be? Average breeding span?
It would be an interesting equation to figure out as to how many trips it would actually take to make a genetically diverse community that also has other society needs met in order to function.
Still, it will be a massive undertaking to build a colony of that size without significant advances in propulsion technology paring the flight times from months to days or hours.
Why would we need to populate Mars in order to preserve humanity? In case humanity managed to wipe itself out on this planet? If that's the case - humanity has managed to f*** up so catastrophically as to destroy itself on its home planet - then it doesn't deserve to be preserved.
And what is the cost, both in terms of resources and pollution, of launching 100,000 times? Even if you kept it in orbit and brought people up to it it's a huge cost.
And I'm betting 100,000 launches is more than have been done in all of history. By a rather large amount, I'd think.
As usual, when I hear futurists telling us about the awesome the future will be ... I find myself thinking "this is impractical, way more than anybody will ever be able to afford, and probably never going to happen".
It sounds like we'd need to pretty much strip the Earth of resources to pull this off, and unless Musk is paying this out of his own damned pocket, I think the entire idea is doomed to fail. And that doesn't change the fact that you're diverting a huge amount of resources for a relatively small percentage of humanity.
This is flying cars, Mr Fusion, and a vast amount of engineering, plus ponies, unicorns, and cats living with dogs ... all in one big overly-optimistic ball of fantasy.
The sheer amount of energy required to do this is so mind boggling as to make the whole idea laughable.
I think the romantic idea of space colonization is pretty cool. But I don't really think it's quite as viable as people like to think it is. At least not with current energy requirements and sources.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What part of mars includes: Dirt that grows, air to breath, water to drink? Industry to create stuff (Like dirt/air/water... or metal, plastic, electronics, etc)? Industry to move around? Buildings to protect since there is no atmosphere to protect?
That last bit about "mars people needing exactly what earth people do" and such was just complete moron talk...
For some reason, when I see the name Elon Musk, I first think of Tesla, not SpaceX. It must be more prevalent in the news lately. What's it like to be the CEO of two of the coolest companies in the world?
I love the idea, but I think it's been mentioned on Slashdot before that the best way to preserve humanity is to build a colony underneath the Earth's surface. Quite far underneath to protect against various threats, including medium sized asteroids and super volcanoes etc. We're talking about a self-contained, self-sustained system, to the furthest extent that we can manage.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The so called "good people" just sit by while the sociopaths of this world rule and govern it, this is the reason why so many Empires were successful in the beginning like the Romans or even the Nazi's and the results were genocide, rapes, tortures, land rapes, etc... So Mr. Battery cars thinks humanity is lost on this planet so now we have to migrate to another? What makes him think it wont turn out like Earth?
Humans are the biggest fucking idiots in this universe!
So basically you're saying let's have Peace, Freedom, and Love for everybody here on Earth. That's far more wishful thinking than dreaming of a million spaceships setting off for Mars.
What technology (gun, car, airplane, microchip, Internet, etc) has managed to eliminate the old ills of poverty, war, etc? We don't need money to fix those problems, we need a change in atittude as a species. We need to eliminate the old supersititions (religion, racial biases) and newer isms (communism, etc). And then we might just have enough time and resources to fix not just the Earth but to terraform Mars as well.
awesome, I love these retro old-skool trolls
I am goddamned tired of hearing what this scumbag con artist "thinks".
He is a bullshitter and anyone who can think for himself KNOWS this is true.
Fuck him, fuck his fantasies, fuck his silly cobbled-up electric
cars, and fuck the people who worship him.
I honestly hope to soon read that Musk has terminal cancer. When he dies
the world will be a better place.
Due to the formidable problem of getting meatbags into orbit safely and cost-effectively, I suspect we'd have better luck uploading our brains into hardware that can handle really high G-forces, and roam the galaxy that way. _Much_ more efficient, don't have to muck about with food or disposal, just ensuring that there's enough solar power and what moving parts you have left aren't seized up.
Okay, okay, if you still want to, you could download back into a meatbag at your final destination.
Musk wants to protect the human race from geological and cosmological extinction events, like dinosaur-killer asteroids. We know that extinction events occur, and that we are currently in the midst of one of the largest such events known (mostly due to human predation and pollution - we're soiling our nest - but there's plenty of other dangers we aren't capable of controlling).
But let's face it; Musk might have the drive and ability to get us to Mars, he certainly does not have the resources or ruthlessness needed to prise the money you need for your project out of the hands of those who are currently sitting on it. The ruling class today loves pollution, and they love economic inequity, because they are driven to have better things than anyone else. That is their sole goal, and they achieve it both by increasing their holdings and decreasing everyone else's. The pure sociopaths are the ruling class and they aren't going to be dislodged without a revolution of some sort, hopefully a bloodless one.
Why don't you pursue your goal, and stop criticizing Musk's lack of devotion to your vision, and I'll help both you, OK?
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
PHEH.
When Dear Leader Futarman jumps the shark, you can be sure there will be a motorcycle, and a shark, involved.
At least I hope he can do better than holing up in a casino for years and allowing his company to be used as a front by the CIA to steal a sunken Soviet submarine.
Actually, come to think about it, THAT's pretty rad.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Do you honestly think that your average asshole is going to start a small business if you pay off their house for them? If you do, you haven't been getting out enough. Not everybody is as driven as you. Admittedly I wish you were right, and I used to think that way. But the more I see of this world and the more I talk to people from all sorts of origins and backgrounds, they're just fucking assholes. Lazy, stupid savages. Let them pay their mortgage themselves.
Seem my other comment here, but in short, pretty much all the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space would make life better on Earth. These include better recycling, power generation, advanced medicine and nutrition, cradle-to-cradle zero emissions manufacturing, greenhouse agriculture, education-on-demand, a library of open source part designs for 3D printing or other manufacturing, better ways of resolving conflicts in small groups or between groups, and so on. So, we don't have to pick one or the other. Sad thing is, we too often seem to pick neither and instead prop up social systems built around "artificial scarcity" and "learned" stupidity.
In general though, I agree with you that we could make the Earth more like a "Star Trek" society. Here is an essay I wrote about that a decade ago:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA by adopting a post-scarcity worldview. This money can help further fund a virtuous cycle of more creative and more cost saving efforts, as well as better education. It calls for the non-profit sector to help shape a new mythology of wealth and to take the lead in getting the average person as well as decision makers to make the shift in worldview to their own long term benefit. "
I'm nearing the end of reading "Player Piano" which several people on Slashdot have recommended regarding understanding humans and technology -- although I think a basic income rather than a work requirement would have created a different society, and Vonnegut also seems to ignore how much effort can go into raising healthy and happy children or being a good friend, neighbor, or citizen -- focusing instead of "jobs" in a manufacturing sense.
Related on learned stupidity, by John Taylor Gatto: http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
"Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
There's nothing wrong with Mars the way it is now. We should leave it alone.
Did Musk write this when he was drunk? Seriously, if you want to do this, it needs to use mostly martian resources rather than sapping earths resources which are needed on earth. Unless a planet has a large supply of water, and at least the ingredients you need to make an oxygen atmosphere, the idea is a no-go. Ideally it would have some land surface (for mining) but also an ample supply of the above mentioned elements. The idea is virtually impossible. If you were concerned about survival such as from an asteroid, what you would do, is create survival groups around earth that would be equipped with underground facilities stocked with an emergency supply of food, not only for humans but also to feed livestock animals, as well as a seed bank. Hidden, secure, and fortified so the group could go underground for years, along with the livestock. The livestock and seeds would be used to rebuild agriculture afterwords. Unlike dinosaurs, we have the capability to survive the worst asteriod strike. though, you want to develop a plan to kill an asteriod before it hits the earth (with a nuke perhaps) as your first line of defense.
There would have to be massive infrastructure, of course, to support a colony that size, and as someone else pointed out, we're not going to up-and-move 1,000,000 people to Mars, even if the infrastructure magically appeared out of thin air.
Honestly, I'm a big fan of the idea of starting with the Moon. Build a colony there. Most of the bugs can be worked out that way, relatively close to Earth, where people can be reasonably rescued if things go horribly wrong. Once we have a million people in permanent settlement on the Moon, then we could realistically think about having a million people living on Mars.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If we could build a colony on mars, a harsh, deadly environment, why couldnt we just build the colony here if it goes a little worse.
We'll need a gigantic amount of pollution to make earth worse of a habitat then mars, no?
I mean, it doesnt even have a decent atmosphere to protect us from outer space radiation or just space junk flying around...
Here's how you do it. First you need to create very small self replicating spacecraft that can identify iron rich(and uranium rich) asteroids and icy asteroids. You program them to work in concert and attach themselves to these bodies and adjust the trajectories so they all pummel mars at approximately the same time, coalescing before impact. This is important the body should coalesce before hitting mars to keep as much matter in tact as possible. If you can gather enough material you can inject a molten core that will last a billion years.
You basically do the same thing with the icy bodies, but shower them down. The point here is to add water.
This is a really long term way of doing it but it is possible. All the ingredients are in the solar system.
Check out the book titled Spin for another long term option. But if we're going long term terraforming, the above method is my preference.
My personal belief is that we need to adapt to living in space and not focus so hard on figuring out how to live on mars. If you can thrive in space, then just about any solar system will do.
How do we collectively learn to care for the life on this wonderful planet, instead of destroying it?
humanity is even worth saving....
I think you must do terraforming first, or the tecnhological infrastructure to keep one million people alive would be just prohibitive.
Crazy billionaires are the best billionaires.
I'm betting that you could probably up that number from a million to a hundred million bankers and lawyers by simply putting them into permanent hibernation prior to lift off. It'll also save money on the back end - just crash the ship into the planet, they're dead already anyway.
Awww, fuck it - just put all the dead bodies in a ship and get it out of Earth orbit. Who cares where they end up at that point? :-)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If you thought international politics was fun, wait until we get a whole new planet in the mix.
Is this how the Wayland Corporation got started?
Who's the prototype for the Bishop Android?
This complete waste of earthly resources would cause the actual doomsday scenario that it's ostensibly protecting us against.
Nonsense. He's never had an utterly insane idea that will simply never work anywhere other than theory.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go hop on the Hyperloop and make it from Boston to LA at 800 mph.
Not that a colony of a million in space is a bad idea, but Mars?
Mars is *far* away, has almost no resources, the trip is long and requires a great deal of fuel. Moreover, if there's a problem, there's no nearby fail safe place to exit to.
Near Earth orbit, in contrast, is close by, near resources like water and oxygen and mined metals, requires little fuel and if there's a major problem in your environment, you can drop down to Earth and try again.
The basic logistics favor the Earth's LaGrange points, without the unnecessary addition of a trip to Mars.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
which makes that planet only a temporary shelter for mankind. In the future mars will have to be evacuated too.
As cool as Musk seems to be, this is the dumbest thing ever. If we were to intentionally pollute and do everything in our power to destroy earths ecosystem it will never be as inhospitable as mars. At least not until the sun turns into a red giant. Get real, Elon.
As a species, if we can't get our act together on this planet,
then why do we deserve yet another one?
Seems a better plan is to figure out how to keep this one.
Think "bigger" -- say you are taking a million people and setting them up on "Earth 2" which is only a hundred trillion light years away - and you can do it in 100 years (after you yourself will have died) - many people will just throw silly money to your idea and you never need to actually do it. That is how these things always turn out.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
The aged and infirm need not apply.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
How much energy under ideal conditions would it take to send 100 women + a sperm bank to Mars with enough food, water, equipment, bacteria, plants, animals, etc. needed to start a viable colony? It all comes down to energy. If it requires more energy than we can deliver, then we are stuck on this planet forever. You can't cheat thermodynamics.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Can I suggest which of the first thirty or forty we put there?
Following that, literally, everyone that thinks driverless cars are a good idea.
No? How about Australia, can we send these people to Australia?
What we need is a vehicle which could move from Earth's orbit to Mar's orbit. Then it's an issue if getting from earth to orbit and from Mars to orbit.
We need an effective way of mining materials we need in space. We need a reliable way of collecting and managing water in space. A moon base is probably a great deal more effective for mining and supply than an earth based supply chain as the launch cost would be much cheaper.
Why does everyone always want to go to Mars before we even figure out how to be in space to begin with?
We need to move people to Mars to save humanity. I'd say investment bankers and stock analysts would be a good start.
Thinking about it... why bother flying all the way to Mars just to get rid of them?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He completely ignores any sex that leads to kids born on mars.
In other words... people who 'Get some ass on mars.'
Hey, where are the 1 percenters when you need them?
Yeah right, put a million people on Mars and the other seven billion of us will have to slave away just to keep them alive there.
And for what? An extraordinarily odd sort of catastrophe that would kill people on earth but leave Mars untouched. No, it's far easier to prepare earth for major disasters such as an asteroid impact, than to keep a million people alive on a planet as inhospitable as Mars.
This guy is clueless. Illustration in point: "And we're talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship." This guy knows nothing. Machinery wears out. Even squeezing 100 trips out of a spaceship is a stretch.
There's nothing wrong with reading science fiction like Kim Robinson's Mars trilogy series. But it gets really, really stupid when you start to believe much of that stuff. The press doesn't help with their policy of 'the dumber the idea, the louder we talk about it."
Most existential disasters are...
1) man-made
2) larger than one planet in scope
There are only a few threats that wouldn't take out Mars too. A meteorite and a plague are the two that come to mind.
Others would likely effect both. A real global war would likely spill over. A passing black hole, solar system, etc, would kill both too.
And then the bigger question: who cares? I don't think anyone on Sirius would mind if we all disappeared. Nor most of the millions of species here on this planet.
It was done in one trip.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Dirt isn't a big problem, nor are the other materials.
The premise has been examined by Andy Weir in his fiction book "The Martian", which shows that you can survive on relatively little. I am making the assumption that he did his chemistry and biology homework whilst writing this :-)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
He's kinda starting to sound a little bit looney toons. Not much, but a teensy teensy bit. But then, I think most very brilliant people tend to do that.
...we need a Million Man Mars?
Hey robot, try to recognize this pattern *makes a fist and extends third digit on left hand*
Lick my batteries.
Actually we know Mars has natural gas - we can detect methane plumes in the atmosphere, believed to be from the photo-decomposition of surface minerals. The question is only whether it has any *harvestable* reserves, and that probably depends on there having been billions of years of life on the planet.
Perhaps more to the point, even if hydrocarbons are everywhere on Mars, they wont be a viable energy source, because they're only half of the equation. To get power you also need oxygen with which to burn them, and on Mars you have to produce your own oxygen from CO2 and water, and even at 100% efficiency that's going to cost you about as much energy as burning the fuel (again at 100% efficiency) will provide. Add in normal efficiency losses and you're just digging yourself an energy hole. Hydrocarbons may still be useful for concentrated energy storage (rocket fuel, etc), but not as an energy source.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And Mars is the wrong habitat for altered humans. If you're going to fix humanity, remove dependence on uncommon conditions. Instead, make us survivable in common conditions:
high radiation
low temperature
vacuum
microgravity
Then we can go live on asteroids or artificial space habitats and not worry about expending a lot of energy just to leave our home rock and find another one. We can live in orbiting space habitats and move them out of the way if a big rock is coming our way. If one space habitat gets smashed anyway, well, tragic, but ideally we'll have millons.
And these re-engineered humans will have a far, far easier time making it to other solar systems, but not to other "life zone" worlds, but rather to artificial worlds in orbit free of the worst chains of gravity.
--PM
It takes 60 days for a ebay seller to receive funds from a paypal purchase from a buyer, all while elon musk collects interest on your funds. By the end of the 60 days the seller is probably homeless on the street, while paypal laughs.,
fuck elon musk and his spaceship, that greedy cocksucker
Anyone who can think for himself knows better than to say things like this.
Diversity is easy enough - bring lots and lots of frozen sperm from as wide a cross-section of humanity as possible. For that matter bring frozen ova as well - no inherent reason that most of a woman's children need to be genetically related to her, though we'd probably need a bit of a cultural shift as well to facilitate that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Apparently, about 2000 individuals is enough to rebuild the human race. Because DNA information indicates that at one point there were about that many people alive. (Google 'human population bottleneck' and take the top link returned to Wikipedia.)
--PM
This just in... A man who makes spaceships for profit argues that we should use more spaceships.
Also in the news, Dan Cathy, owner of Chick Fil A, argues that people should really eat more delicious AND healthy chicken sandwiches to safeguard humanity from the deleterious environmental effects of factory farming of cows.
Why are we so arrogant to assume we must do everything to save our species survival?
If we do ourselves in, then we do not deserve to exist and should not spread as far out in the galaxy like some kind of plague until some aliens cure the problem. Going to mars is an exercise that might motivate people but it has ZERO merit. Send robots... and figure out a new economy that saves us, nature, and lets us live in peace with the advanced robots that replace nearly every human profession (which will come sooner if you just invested in robotics for Mars instead of wasting effort infecting another planet with humans.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
There is an exactly 100% chance of nuclear war if we settle one planet and we get arrogant enough to say that we had conquered/secured said planet. Then no one will care about the people on Mars or Earth. We can barely care enough about each other to get through the day. We need to get over this insane one world goverment and just accept that people need independence to be productive and that everyone has a right to their own human rights and beliefs. Read the writing on the wall. It only takes a minute.
Anything Earth-based is going to have to deal with the socio-political fallout of imminent ecosystem collapse: Doesn't do you a damn bit of good to have a viable closed ecosystem unless you can also support a militia sufficient to repel the barbarians at the gates - and if things get bad on Earth the "barbarians" are going to be fully equipped with modern military hardware - your garden doesn't stand a chance. A Mars colony won't have to worry about that - and Mars is by far the most hospitable place in the solar system outside Earth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Exactly. Building any kind of colony in space will probably be easier and less expensive than building it on Mars. If nothing else, it will be a lot easier to send the initial manufacturing equipment there, since it will be a lot closer to Earth. And once it's built it will have lots of advantages: closer to Earth, no gravity well making it hard to come and go, closer to the sun (hence much greater supply of solar energy), and you get to live in normal Earth gravity (from rotating the colony to create artificial gravity) rather than the 38% Earth gravity you get on Mars. We don't even know if humans *can* be healthy living long term in such low gravity.
Way back in 1975, NASA estimated the total cost of building a space colony large enough to permanently house 10,000 people at $190 billion. And that was relying entirely on 1975 technology. This is totally something we could do, if we really wanted to.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I'm all for colonization of other worlds in order to hedge our bets for humanity's survival, but given results showing deleterious health effects when one is not subject to Earth gravity for a prolonged period, it would be silly to try to colonize Mars and its feebler-than-Earth gravity until genetic engineering can assure good health for the colonists. Good luck having this wrinkle ironed out in a century--and that's something I'd be willing to long bet on.
There is reason to be greatly pessimistic in regards to space exploration, because the general tendency has become for us to turn towards inner space, not outer--a phenomenon driven by information technology and the continued encroachment of the virtual into the daily lives of most. It's far cheaper (effort, energy, and resources--not merely finance), and the eternal human drive for short term rewards and maximal convenience at minimum cost pretty much guarantees eventually the physical world will be relegated in status to the minimum necessary to survive "for the time being", while most of a mind's time is spent in the virtual. Little attention will be paid by the vast majority to long-term continuation of humanity--far less than even today, when this concern is already so impoverished.
I'll note here that Asimov's greatest novel (albeit one not among his most famous works), The End of Eternity, has direct bearing upon this issue, and is more relevant now than it was at the time it came out back in the 1950s.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
If you build a massive transportation infrastructure capable of hauling people & cargo for numerous several month journeys, you've pretty much adapted humanity to live in the space between worlds. At that point, why limit yourself to just Mars? As much as I'd love to visit, climb the mountains, rappel the canyons, and explore the lava tubes, there's a lot more solar system to see. Colonizing Mars adds one element of redundancy, but numerous self-sufficient space colonies, living off sunlight and the rich (and accessible) resources of asteroids would be far more robust - and interesting.
Worth reading http://www.space.com/21554-mar... on toxic soil on Mars.
Floating cities in the upper atmosphere of Venus would be much more inviting. Venus is a lovely planet, just the ground is a bit too low down. Loads of solar energy, air is a lifting gas, you could live in a bubble of regular air floating in the atmosphere (if the outer atmosphere doesn't melt your bubble due to being a bit sulphuric acidy) The sulphuric acid can be used for things, add copper oxide and you get copper sulphate plus water, it contains oxygen and you have loads of solar energy, so splitting things with electrolysis is viable. There are probably interesting resources on the surface (perhaps freed up nicely by all the acid rain) which robots could go down and extract.
I think it is the second best planet in the solar system.
Couldn't we throw the kaiper belt at it (stirring up dust to help with building an atmosphere), then mine the asteroids ( releasing cfc's which are needed for the atmosphere), leaving plenty of resources, an atmosphere, and probably water.
While I fully agree we could make this place a Star Trek-like utopian society (a la The Economics of Star Trek), the point is that no matter how seaworthy you make a ship, it can still be sunk. The Earth could still suffer an extinction event that we can't prevent. Mars is really our best Plan B. We have to get in more boats to make sure we stay afloat as a species.
Mars is the easiest of the options. The others - the moon (too little gravity, can never be terraformed), a giant space station (extremely large structure required to contain 1 million humans), Venus (cloud cities perhaps), Jovian satellites (radiation, extreme cold) are tougher options.
Are you trying to make Mars the next Australia?
There is a The Surprisingly Strong Case for Colonizing Venus.
That's what the Martians said about Earth!
I applaud the man for his forward thinking but he's living in a dream world if he thinks this is even remotely plausible any time soon.
:)
As far as manned space travel goes, we've barely made it to the moon. Our GLOBAL space program barely qualifies to even call it such. It's rare we can get a vehicle off the ground on the first try ( or three ) without some glitch mucking things up. And we're just trying to get it off the damn ground lol
Consider:
We still use fossil fuels
We kill each other over make believe entities in the sky
We kill each other for resources
Hell, we kill each other for fun and for practice
We haven't conquered war, poverty, hunger or disease and he thinks we have what it takes to colonize another planet ? For what exactly ? So we can spread our problems to Mars as well ? Hah
Maybe, just maybe, it's the destiny of a species as fucked up as ours to go extinct lest we infest the rest of the galaxy with our " way of life ".
We can't even fix the problems we have here on Earth and this guy is talking about going to Mars
Hint: Odds favor an extinction level asteroid / comet strike long before the dominant species on this planet puts their differences aside to allow us to achieve the level of technology needed to colonize another planet.
For a bit of rabbit hole fun, go look up the term, "Alternative 3".
A hoax documentary from the 70's in the vein of Orson Wells, except it missed its intended air date, (April Fool's) and aired a couple of months later, flipping people out and leaving its mark on countless 10 year-olds. (How old is Elon Musk?)
Heck, I'll pull it up for you. Super fun:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
There will be no barbarians at the gates in Antarctica, or under the ocean.
This space intentionally left blank
why ever would you want to inflict the cancer known as Man on another planet?
Look at what we've done to this planet and then think about continuing this to another planet and maybe even another solar system. NO, once they've released the ebolapox into real general distribution the universe will be purged of this blight known as Man.
Specialization and dvision of labor are essential factors of technological development. You need a large population (demand) to justify some investments such as education in advanced fields, advanced machinery for high productivity and pursuing economies of scale.
I doubt that a population of a million could support the level of technology required for life on Mars. Working knowledge would be lost (knowledge in a book in little use compared to knowledge in someone's brain).
There have been historical instances of such regressions where groups were cut off from the larger population and regressed technologically as their market shrunk.
As Adam Smith put it, "The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market".
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
Making a couple billion dollars has really gone to Musk's head.
The British transported prisoners to Australia and look how that worked out. Assuming we ignore Mel Gibson for a bit.
What I want to know is why everyone is so worried about continuing the human race. What is so important about it? Where does this obsession with having the human race be eternal come from?
It took 17 tons of material to support one soldier in WWII per year. Replace the tanks, the bombs. the ammo, the food and clothing and whatever else goes into that figure, and you can see how the trip to Mars to support one person is immense. Not to mention the technology, the biology, the ecology ... Elon Musk is talking about an ark for mankind.
Just think about the gravity, the electromagnetic shielding, the microbiology, the environment, the housing, the food, the water ... all the things that are necessary for life.
God made man out of the clay of the earth, then he breathed life into him. The problem is that man is connected to the Earth. Maybe, it's time we start taking care of the Earth and each other, rather than killing ourselves and destroying the environment.
That's one thing the Hebrews of antiquity believed in, that one God would restore all things. That's why the disciples asked Jesus, when is the restoration of all things.
You could bring any number larger than one breed pair, a few extra women, and a supply of 'male samples' to impregnate them once arriving. Even some already fertilized eggs to be implanted for surrogates. That would be more economic than taking that many people. I guess we could go full on and try artificial wombs, but that is getting a little to sci-fi even for me. Still the need for supplies until the colony could be big enough to be self sustaining is an significant logistics issue.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Essentially you are describing how humans become (if we are not already) a self-replicating virus. Or perhaps we will become the algae of the universe..
...now isn't that an idea that's out of this world?