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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."
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?
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
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
He advances mankind more in a day than you'll accomplish in your whole useless life. What kind of arrogance leads the simple-minded to throw rocks at people actually succeeding at changing the world?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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...
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.
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
How so? He's been saying this for years now, in one form or another. And as a society you're lucky to have some crazy people like Musk to make up for legions of bean-counter types.
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?