The Strangeness of the Mars One Project

superboj sends an article written after its author investigated the Mars One Project for over a year. Even though 200,000 people have (supposedly) signed up as potential volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars, there are still frightfully few details about how the mission will be accomplished. From the article: [Astronaut Chris Hadfield] says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it. "I really counsel every single one of the people who is interested in Mars One, whenever they ask me about it, to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle that is orbiting Earth. I want to know: How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist. You can’t just go to SpaceMart and buy those things." The author concludes that the Mars One Project is "...at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work."

Comments

Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Computers got better and 3D printers... and stuff. That's how it's going to happen. Don't you dare contradict the geeks with facts

http://www.distancetomars.com/

Their Space Derangement Syndrome will come out full blast! That is, until this dies down and is forgotten, just like the 1997 Japanese Space Hotel

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/2...

or OTRAG...

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

I am torn on this issue.

On the one hand, I agree with the submission's stance. Those things are custom engineered to perform optimally in the specific problem domain they are engineered for. A space suit worn to do EVAs wont work on mars, or vice versa.

The habitats need to be designed with all manner of ergonomic considerations; people will live the rest of their lives inside the damned thing. They need to be designed to withstand constant ablation by blowing sand and fine particulate dusts. They need to have door seals that are up the the task. They need to have robust circuitry that can withstand the increased intensity of solar storm radiation, since mars lacks a comprehensive global magnetosphere. So many things need to be engineered for, purpose built for the specific tasks at hand, and built to not only last, but last a lifetime, or longer.

On the other hand, the nature of this kind of mission makes it toxic to any world government that would actually be able to accomplish it properly. No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people. That's what a manned mission to mars would be. It would require much more than the vertical thrust booster used by the LLM in the 60s to get the crew back to the command module. It would take another complete lower stage rocket. Unless you want to soft-land something that weighs millions of tons, filled with highly volatile propellant on mars so that the crew can get back into space again after the mission period is over, you are planning a one-way trip, and that means consigning those people to die up there.

Politically, a proper mars mission is a non-starter.

That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.

Sadly, that same sociopathy means that any such mission will be done with duct tape, bailing wire, and discount bubblegum wrappers. Lowest bidder on everything. Minimum training for the mission personnel. A mission that, if it succeeds, it would be a statistical anomaly.

I am conflicted.

I want people to get off this planet. But at the same time, I want them to get there safely, properly, and with the tools they need to actually have a chance to pull it off.

I agree with the article author, that the lack of meaty information about this project is not something that instills confidence. By now, the first round of selectees should be getting initial training. Where are they being trained, and what are they being taught? Did they even get out of their homes yet?

Who knows.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotInHere]

We have to think of everything -- and more. We should have solved the problems the people on mars will face before we send them there. There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc... Medicine needs to be advanced far much further, so that possible cancer from the radiation can be healed or prevented.

If these conditions are provided, we can try to get to mars without a large risk. We will need unmanned testing missions before. We will need a shitload of money.

Its far more likely that we will send people that die early. We will have to realize that that will be a send-and-die mission. We don't have the patience to build, test and plan for a mission this complex and large.

Our long term goal should be on how to bootstrap an industrialized system from some rockets we sent there. Things you can manufacture on mars will be cheap, but things you need to send there will be expensive. When you've reached the point where you can build a rocket (or at least the heaviest parts of it) you can get back. This can be as simple as the fuel, and dumb parts of the lower stages.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

I want people to get off this planet.

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Space is mind bogglingly large but despite that the Earth is fucking huge. Helpfully it's also absolutely drenched in the sort of things us humans need to survive. With a bit of preparation we can readily travel to just about anywhere on the surface of the Earth. To simply survive we don't need to bring significant amounts of our home environment along with us.

The Earth is also jam packed with resources. The idea of mining asteroids and comets is laughable. It's ridiculously expensive to actually do and nowhere even remotely close to being cost effective. It's not even a question of profitability, it's simply wasteful to expand the resources to mine a single asteroid when a single mountain on Earth is far more accessible and likely has a much better yield of industrially useful materials. It simply does not make sense to pay thousands or millions of dollars a pound for carbon, ice, or silicon (the primary component of most asteroids and comets). Even for space based industry, launched prices of a thousand dollars a pound means it's more economical to build stuff on Earth and launch it into space.

The idea of "spreading out the species" is another very silly idea. It would take a ridiculous amount of resources to build even a remotely sustainable colony somewhere else in the solar system. There's simply nowhere else in the solar system where humans can easily survive. Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.

Re:Uh, simple

[gl4ss]

well they don't have the money to send a small gift box to mars so that's why they haven't had the money or thought it worth the effort to figure out the gritty details.

Re:Uh, simple

[hawguy]

I want people to get off this planet.

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Redundancy. There are lots of potential disasters that could wipe out life on earth. Most (but not all) of them are remediated by having humans on another planet.

Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.

Isn't that the point of sending people to mars? To build infrastructure to allow more people to arrive?

Granted, 6 people living in a tiny habitate on mars aren't going to recolonize Earth even if they had the means to come back, but a colony of 100,000 might. Such a large colony may be decades (centuries?) in the future, but until the first people arrive, there will continue to be zero people on mars -- someone has to be first.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

political freedom for starters.

Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.

There isnt a single place on earth where people can go to escape.

And of course, in addition to that little gem, there's also the issue of having all eggs in one basket. One very large asteroid impact, and oops-- no more humans.

I want to see people get off of this planet not to satisfy some grandiose fantasy. The earth is so interconnected with all inhabited centers that any number of disasters would spell the end. It's simply a sensible thing to get human presence elsewhere in the solar system.

Nothing to do with "Wonder", or "Exploration", or "Fullfillment"-- More utilitarian reasons.

Thats why I dont want those people to be dropped in a tincan without any air to breathe. I want them to have what they need to survive, and thrive.

Re:Uh, simple

[Wycliffe]

There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc...

I would start by creating self contained units that can survive equally well in the sahara, antartica, and underwater with minimal* air exchange with
the outside. Salt water, cold, and sand are notoriously hard on equipment and if a single type of unit can survive in all 3 environments then they
might have a fighting chance. My guess is we have very little that can survive 80 years in any of those 3 environments without repair materials
being sent and I don't see mars being self sufficient for a very long time.

* the only reason I say minimal is that there is no reason even on mars that you couldn't do outgassing or ingassing of needed or unneeded
gases. It doesn't have to be 100% self contained if there is some way to regulate correctly the amount of different gases in the environment.

Re:Uh, simple

[kylemonger]

You're kinda missing the point of asteroid mining. The idea is to gather useful materials up there and keep them up there to support a space based civilization. That way you can use and move the stuff around using energy efficient transfer orbits and modest amounts of delta-vee, instead of lifting mountains of material against Earth's gravity. A lot of high-tech from Earth will be needed to bootstrap early operations, but the goal would be a self supporting space-based society based on raw resources available in space, eventually trading with Earth-based societies.

I don't know how long developing such a society would take, but it'll likely be started by people nearly everyone else considers lunatics. Something like Mars One should be a rehearsal for later attempts at colonizing space itself, without a planet under your feet.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotInHere]

"spreading out the species" Is the key point we have worked on for nearly 2 million years, no why stop. As our planet is sufficiently populated and more or less under our control (ok it isn't, but at least we can survive for now), we have now to set out for other possible zones to live. Perhaps we have to change how we live and what we are. We've however already been there and done that. Multiple times. One example of recent times is that grown-ups can digest milk -- a result of us having settled down. Not a large change, but one that was a result of us being so smart ;). Also clothing is the low-tech analogon of the martian suits, it makes vast parts of the earth habitable. One day we can create nano-robots and engineer our DNA, so that we can live on less friendly planets, too. Evolution has tailored our bodies to earth. There is nothing keeping us from tailoring ourselfes to other planets, through a mixture of technology and biology. The only difference is that there will be no gradual evolution, we either make the step, or don't do it. And our first attempts to make the step will fail, but we shouldn't be upset about that.

Re:Uh, simple

[whereiswaldo]

If it was imperative that we leave Earth within 5 or 10 years, how would we begin? Let's do that. There is no certainty that we have more time.

At least, that's one way of thinking.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotSanguine]

I want people to get off this planet.

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Thank you for your opinion. If that's how you feel, great. I'm happy for you. But you don't get to decide for everybody else what's important to them. What motivates others is neither definable by you, nor is it any of your business.

Will others be successful? Maybe. Personally, I don't think that colonizing Mars is a good first step, but I'm not closed-minded or narcissistic enough to think that my own trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature -- unlike some people. As such, I wish those folks all the best in their endeavors.

Now go away and allow those who actually have some vision and intestinal fortitude continue along their own path.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

" But you don't get to decide for everybody else what's important to them. What motivates others is neither definable by you, nor is it any of your business."

Yet you think you're a spokesperson for the SPEEEEECIIIEEEEEEES!!! (with echo effect!)

Whackacracka-doodle-doo!!!

Re:Uh, simple

[NotSanguine]

" But you don't get to decide for everybody else what's important to them. What motivates others is neither definable by you, nor is it any of your business."

Yet you think you're a spokesperson for the SPEEEEECIIIEEEEEEES!!! (with echo effect!)

Whackacracka-doodle-doo!!!

Interesting that after I express my opinion that it's inappropriate to tell other people what to think or feel, you claim I'm speaking for everyone. I'm going to assume you're not a native English speaker and just misunderstood. The alternative is that you're just another troll. Don't you have some midget porn to watch or something instead?

Re:Uh, simple

[AJWM]

Its far more likely that we will send people that die early.

Yep. Being a pioneer is all about finding new and interesting ways to die ... or the old ways in new settings.

See for example the first few hundred years (counting from the Vikings) of European colonization attempts of North America. (Probably the same holds true of Asian attempts, but they're a lot further back in the prehistorical record.)

Or more recently, the roughly 10% that died along the Oregon Trail.

As a plaque on some old Conestoga wagon puts it: "The cowards never started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived."

That said, only the stupid set out on a trek like that without preparation, and they don't even last as long as the weak. If Mars One has being doing preparation, they haven't been talking about it.

Re:Uh, simple

[AJWM]

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Unacceptable to you, perhaps. What a miserable existence you must suffer.

It does, however, explain your failure of imagination.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just Darwinism at work. In this case, survival of the smartest. Anyone dumb enough to sign up for Mars One deserves to die when the spaceship inevitably blows up or fails. This is a good thing, as the collective intelligence of the human race will increase.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

Unacceptable to you, perhaps. What a miserable existence you must suffer.

It does, however, explain your failure of imagination.

If you have to resort to insults rather than presenting a cogent argument maybe you're not quite capable of participating in the conversation. It's certainly food for thought.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

Will others be successful? Maybe. Personally, I don't think that colonizing Mars is a good first step, but I'm not closed-minded or narcissistic enough to think that my own trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature -- unlike some people. As such, I wish those folks all the best in their endeavors.

Now go away and allow those who actually have some vision and intestinal fortitude continue along their own path.

It seems a trend to turn to petty and childish insults rather than try to provide cogent arguments or participate in a conversation. It's pretty sad.

The Mars One "project" is such amazingly obvious bullshit I honestly feel bad for anyone that thinks they are serious. Chris Hadfield is 100% correct in his analysis of the project. It's not only going nowhere but was intended from the beginning to go nowhere, it's a scam to part overly hopeful of gullible people from their money. Supporting the Mars One group is just supporting exploitation rather than furthering space exploration.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotSanguine]

Will others be successful? Maybe. Personally, I don't think that colonizing Mars is a good first step, but I'm not closed-minded or narcissistic enough to think that my own trained-in prejudices are the laws of nature -- unlike some people. As such, I wish those folks all the best in their endeavors.

Now go away and allow those who actually have some vision and intestinal fortitude continue along their own path.

It seems a trend to turn to petty and childish insults rather than try to provide cogent arguments or participate in a conversation. It's pretty sad.

The Mars One "project" is such amazingly obvious bullshit I honestly feel bad for anyone that thinks they are serious. Chris Hadfield is 100% correct in his analysis of the project. It's not only going nowhere but was intended from the beginning to go nowhere, it's a scam to part overly hopeful of gullible people from their money. Supporting the Mars One group is just supporting exploitation rather than furthering space exploration.

I don't object to calling Mars One a steaming pile. If it's not a scam, it's an excellent facsimile thereof. Nor did I make any comment that even comes close to saying that Mars One has any kind of real chance to do what they're claiming. I even read TFA and I agree with Hadfield as well.

I do object to folks trying to shove their prejudices down other people's throats. You said:

Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.

Who are you to tell GP what is and isn't acceptable motivation for their goals? A busybody. You are most certainly entitled to your beliefs and opinions, but you aren't entitled to tell others which of their beliefs and values are "acceptable." I'm reminded of a Heinlein quote that, IMHO, applies nicely here:

“The correct way to punctuate a sentence that states: "Of course it is none of my business, but -- " is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.”

Consider this as me supplying you with a period, friend.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

You have somer serious misconceptions in this post.

One example of recent times is that grown-ups can digest milk -- a result of us having settled down. Not a large change, but one that was a result of us being so smart ;).

The ability for adults to digest milk has nothing to do with "settling down". Adults producing the lactase enzyme is a result of natural selection favoring humans that could digest dairy in regions where it was a viable food source. Both goats and cows are grazing animals and so prehistoric humans that drank their milk didn't have to "settle down" to herd them. Humans remained fairly nomadic until large scale agriculture developed. Lactose tolerance came long before agriculture. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

Also clothing is the low-tech analogon of the martian suits, it makes vast parts of the earth habitable.

This is incorrect by several orders of magnitude. Clothes don't allow don't make parts of Earth more habitable. If you're stuck in the Alaskan wilderness you can still die of exposure even if you have warm clothes. Clothes tend to allow people to more comfortably live in some areas but they don't do a lot to make those places livable. Shelter makes inhospitable parts of the Earth livable, clothes let you get between different shelters.

Space suits needed on Mars don't need to just keep people warm or dry but provide them with a breathable atmosphere at a workable pressure. They'll also need to have facilities for hydration and feeding since they'll be self contained. A space suit capable of keeping someone alive on Mars is much more than mere clothing.

One day we can create nano-robots and engineer our DNA, so that we can live on less friendly planets, too. Evolution has tailored our bodies to earth. There is nothing keeping us from tailoring ourselfes to other planets, through a mixture of technology and biology.

This is just fantasy. Genetic engineering could in the future filter out congenital diseases or make everyone lactose tolerant but it's a little absurd to state as a matter of fact that we could engineer ourselves to live on Mars (or some other planet). Large complex organisms like humans can't be easily adapted for life on Mars or elsewhere. We're not tardigrades or bacteria. Even if we did manage to somehow engineer ourselves to live on Mars or elsewhere those creations would no longer be "ourselves". They would be a wholly new species and incompatible with our own. They would as as alien to us as native Martian bacteria.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I admire your handling of Space Nutter "arguments". "Ritual" is more like it, like any religion you have some trigger words and the whole sermon just comes rolling out. It's just a torrent of meaningless babble but how they take it seriously!

Space Derangement Syndrome is real!

Re:Uh, simple

[NotInHere]

OK point taken, drinking milk doesn't need us to settle down.

But with the clothes I disagree. Yes you can die of exposure in alaskan wilderness, but clothes are more than just something that adds comfort. I'm not talking about 20th+ century humans who can use their heated cars to get anywhere, I'm talking of the inuit on their sled on the way to catch a seal. Try that without clothes. And yes, space suits are far more complicated than the clothes we wear, and yes on mars we are far more reliant on the suits as we are on earth. But they won't need to feed everyboby. Thats a nice feature, but not neccessary for survival.

Tailoring us to mars by genetic engineering alone is nearly impossible, I agree with you on that. My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology. I haven't said that it's only changes to DNA. My idea was more around changing the DNA to fit the environment as best as possible, and then add suits for the remaining "friction". Those will hopefully be leaner than the suits in which we are visiting mars now. And about binary compatibility... its the headers that matter. Linux on ARM is completely different from Linux on i86, but still you regard them as the same. Unfortunately we only have the binary code, and now have to port to another arch... thats going to be hard. Better get a VM (suits).

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's that we need to not send repair materials, but they should be included up front. Consider them as consumables.

For example, salt water is (currently) best dealt with by sacrificial anodes. It's dirt cheap (when you don't need to lift the mass), and it works very effectively. You just need to make sure to launch with enough of them to supply a large safety factor. This is engineering 101. You don't build products that rely on critical parts you anticipate becoming unavailable. You make sure there's enough of them, or you redesign.

You build in enough consumables to replace the parts that can go wrong (which is a very lengthy list--sorry, no magic bullets) and you also build in a system to transition away from supply missions before you exceed the normal working life--NOT the safety factor(s). Mining will be crucial to human expansion; indeed, this is one of the twin reasons to expand. We want a backup for humanity and more space for everyone, but we also simultaneously want to expand our mining territory. I'd rather turn Earth into a nature preserve, as we only have one of it, and do the mining somewhere else that's already barren and dead.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

I don't know how long developing such a society would take, but it'll likely be started by people nearly everyone else considers lunatics. Something like Mars One should be a rehearsal for later attempts at colonizing space itself, without a planet under your feet.

Mars One is a sad scam. It is not real. It was never intended to be real, it has always been intended to separate gullible people from their money.

Bootstrapping a space based industry would be fantastically expensive. Delta-v is the least of your concerns with space based industry. It's the simple questions like "how do you lubricate mechanical compoentns" or "what do you do about swarf in microgravity?" that are the really expensive problematic things. The bootstrapping needs to find viable solutions to those problems, launch it into orbit, assemble it, and then maintain it until a point where it becomes self-sustaining (assuming that point exists).

It's more likely that the cheapest solution will be manufacture finished items on Earth and launch them into space (what we do now). It's not likely there exists a break even point for space based industry. There's just way too many small problems to overcome to make it really feasible. The ISS cost about $150 billion to construct, a minimally feasible space-based industrial base would likely need to be at least an order of magnitude larger. The comparable investment in mining, refining, and manufacturing on Earth would yield significantly higher output.

Re:Uh, simple

[RobotBorg]

A Mars colony, even if self-sustaining, doesn't even ensure our species survival against several plausible end of the world scenarios.

A gamma ray burst event works on the scale of *solar systems*, not worlds. If our system is sterilized by by a GRB we die, be it on Mars or Earth or the Kuiper belt. There is no defense except interstellar civilization.

The theorized quantum vacuum destabilization will end all existence in the galaxy and beyond, let alone our little sliver of it. A new pocket reality of low energy space will expand from some point, and when it reaches us at light speed our bodies and worlds and ships will just stop being things. Not even an interstellar civilization could survive. We would need FTL ships capable of crossing the unimaginable distances between superclusters to keep our species going as super clusters are receding from each other faster than light, so a Doom-o-sphere expanding at light speed will never reach us.

The sun's massively increased energy output in a billion years, predicted to evaporate the oceans and bombard the Earth with intense stellar radiation, will ironically only make Earth slightly less hospitable than Mars is right this second. Mars is already lacking a magnetosphere to predict it from radiation, its oceans have already boiled away into space, its advanced forms of life - if they ever existed - are all long dead and would need to be re-introduced by humanity to make a colony self-sustaining.

Finally, nuclear war. Contrary to popular belief, full scale nuclear war will not end all life on Earth. There are simply too many people living in too many places for us all to ever die to modern nuclear bombs - which are as far as can be done with a nuke surgical instruments for devastating the enemy's nuclear and industrial capacity. And even if we did invest in planet-killing weapons, like Szilárd's theorized 'cobalt salted bombs', ICBMs can easily become IPBMs (interplanetary ballistic missiles). Allowing politicians can ensure Mars dies along with Earth when the day comes (we all know politicians love sharing). Being on Mars buys you a weeks of life before you too are killed.

The only scenario an extra-planetary colony saves us from is asteroid impact. A big rock from space, short of a Theia-level planet-to-planet collusion which liquefies the crust, is a lot like nuclear bombardment in that there is little chance of it killing us. Again, there are too many of us and we're too spread out. So long as multicellular eukaryotic life exists, humans can exist - we fuck like rabbits and are pretty clever. The only advantage of a Mars colony is help restarting Earth's technological base after the dust clears, which why not built time capsules for cheaper?

So yes, a rogue planet slamming into Earth is pretty much the only time "humanity" really needs an extra planetary colony. And that seems so unlikely it strikes me as bizarre to try and plan around it.

Re:Uh, simple

[Concerned Onlooker]

"No politician in this universe wants to be the one who willfully signs the death certificates of highly trained, highly intelligent and skilled people."

I don't know why. They usually have no problem sending large numbers of people to their deaths. All we need to do is convince them that there are probably terrorists on Mars and it'll be a done deal.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

Isn't that the point of sending people to mars? To build infrastructure to allow more people to arrive?

Granted, 6 people living in a tiny habitate on mars aren't going to recolonize Earth even if they had the means to come back, but a colony of 100,000 might. Such a large colony may be decades (centuries?) in the future, but until the first people arrive, there will continue to be zero people on mars -- someone has to be first.

Infrastructure is a lot more complicated some pressure capsules and solar panels. Infrastructure to make a colony viable would mean agriculture and industry (including ways to deal with their negative externalities). Everything about both of those would need to be bootstrapped from Earth.

Even at SpaceX's best rates for the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules at maximum capacity it would take over 14,000 launches to put those 100,000 colonists into orbit. That alone would cost a trillion dollars (assuming awesome rates from SpaceX and no failures). Just the structures and resources to keep those people alive for the first year would cost several tens of trillions of dollars more. The infrastructure to make an actual colony...well hopefully you get the picture. To put the numbers in better perspective we've only launched a little over 300 manned orbital missions in history. Ever.

Re:Uh, simple

[Graymalkin]

Consider this as me supplying you with a period, friend.

Using a Heinlein quote to be insulting is no more mature than insulting me directly. It's certainly not a sign of cleverness. It's actually pretty sad.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing more annoying than the Space Nutters is the Space Nutter Nutters.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths. People that dont mind if people die, and dont care about being associated with signing that check. Corporate America, and those similarly aligned to the all mighty dollar.

Everyone is going to die regardless of if it is on Earth or Mars. If you aren't a sociopath yourself, get to work researching ways to achieve at a minimum biological immortality, you fucking sociopath.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"One very large asteroid impact, and oops-- no more humans."

Also nobody left to care. Life won't be wiped out, so the earth will still see some life action on it's surface, if that matters one bit.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotSanguine]

Consider this as me supplying you with a period, friend.

Using a Heinlein quote to be insulting is no more mature than insulting me directly. It's certainly not a sign of cleverness. It's actually pretty sad.

Thanks for the tip. Next time I'll insult you directly. But, darn it, I've always loved that quote and your obnoxious comments made it so easy to use it on you. As for maturity, pot, meet kettle.

Oh, and have a great day!

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

political freedom for starters.

I stand astounded. Whatever makes you think that living on Mars will bring political freedom? How are those ideas even connected?

Everything about Mars suggests that political freedom is virtually impossible. You will not be able to pay the cost of your transfer to Mars (including the tons of food and supplies needed to keep you alive there). This means that to convince someone to pay for your trip to Mars, they will require something from you in return. The basis of life on Mars is obligation - your obligation to the government or company that paid for you to travel there.

In addition there is the issue that nobody on Mars will have any money or any means to make money. There is no resources , no soil to grow crops, no infrastructure to support primary industry or manufacturing. At best people might trade the various things they brought from earth. And themselves (i.e. prostitution), although the notion of sex will be less attractive after the radiation sickness kicks in.

Mars will be like prison, without any chance of escape. Linking life on Mars with political freedom is simply laughable.

Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.

It might not have occurred to you that you caused that orwellian state. Who is to blame for the state of Western democracy but ourselves? In which, you will just take that corruption with you to Mars. Unless you view yourself and coincidentally your fellow travellers as somehow more enlightened than the rest of us - do you think that?

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't work like that. Only works if they left no children behind. And if they weren't going to have children anyways it has no effect. Also, who says the leavers aren't smart? The ones leaving are in some way unhappy with their situation here on earth. It's the same way humans have always explored and settled new areas. THE EXACT SAME WAY. So, if your assesment hold true that mean the US, for example, should be full of dumb enough people to sign up for dangerous journey across the ocean and their offspring. No, wait. Damnit.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

Inuits make their clothes out of things they find locally. Their jackets aren't made 54.6 million kilometres away. Also, if I leave my shirt unbuttoned, I'll feel cold. I won't instantly die. If an Inuit tears their jacket, they don't die instantly. These things are several orders of magnitude apart.

My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology.

If we were actually committed to the technology, we would never have to go ourselves. Sending human bodies implies a zealous commitment to a low tech solution frozen in time, like steam power in the age of electric cars. If we had the technology to make Mars comfortable we would have no need to do so, since martian robots will outstrip the utility of the human body by a country light year. And biologically we can never survive on Mars. Apart from the cold, there is no atmosphere, so exposure to the outside will cause ruptures in the cell walls, with consequent death directly after. You body is a bag of water made of billions of bags of water: they will burst on contact with the vacuum of Mars.

Re:Uh, simple

[angel'o'sphere]

It's not even a question of profitability, it's simply wasteful to expand the resources to mine a single asteroid when a single mountain on Earth is far more accessible and likely has a much better yield of industrially useful materials.
There are no mountains made from pure gold, pure iridium, pure iron or pure coal.
However there are such asteroids.
So from a strictly monetary standpoint mining asteroids makes a lot of sense if you don't care what the economic impact on earth is.

Re:Uh, simple

[yndrd1984]

You body is a bag of water made of billions of bags of water: they will burst on contact with the vacuum of Mars.

Citation needed.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

You know. I tried to write a calm, and sensible reply to this poisoned barb you have thrown at me, and I just couldn't do it.

Let's just say that you are simply wrong on a good many of your points.

Here are just a few of them:

1) You make the mistake in asserting that people leaving earth as political asylum seekers would be doing so without something already being there. Even the puritans didnt leave england en-mass until AFTER the colonies in north america were fully settled and productive. --What you are are failing to grasp, is that there would not be such a place to go, if nobody makes the damned colony; The puritans would never have left england, because the colonists never would have preceded them. Did all the irish people fleeing ireland after the potato fammine come with metric fucktons of food and other things? No-- they sold themselves into indentured servitude to come here, with just the clothes on their backs. Why? because there was a means of producing food over here already.

There is nothing inconsistent with wishing to create a colony, with the intention of permitting political asylum once it is able to accept such persons. Granting asylum is a great way to get desperately needed genetic variability and skill diversity for such a project once it is ready to accept such people. The notion that the colony would be built by political refugees when they have no money or resources with which to do it is a strawman of your own construction-- Good thing it isnt what I advocated! Beat that strawman all you want, his stuffing coming out does not impact my position in the slightest.

2) You make the implicit assumption that no industrial capacity or food production would ever be possible on-site at mars. This is a very laughable position to take, so laughable in fact, I wonder from what body of information you produced it from. Data from multiple rovers at very diverse areas on the martian surface has revealed very useful and valuable minerals. Not terribly useful here on earth mind-- we have water, nitrogen and oxygen in copious abundance-- But for martian colonists, those minerals would be more valuable than gold. Do you have any idea how much water is chemically stored in gypsum? Here's a hint-- Gypsum has the chemical formula CaSO4(2 H2O) It's a hydrated sulfate mineral. For every mole of gypsum, 2 moles of water can be produced. The process to do so? Heat it up to about 500 degrees F, and catch the vapor that comes out. Is gypsum a common soil mineral on mars? Apparently so-- Nasa's rovers have found very large veins of the shit.

In fact, There are entire expanses of sand dunes made of gypsum sand in the northern hemisphere of mars.

To quote the linked page:

Observations from orbit had detected gypsum on Mars previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. The origin of that windblown gypsum is, however, uncertain.

"It is a mystery where gypsum sand on northern Mars comes from," said Opportunity science-team member Benton Clark of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "At Homestake, however, we see the mineral right where it formed. It will be important to see if there are deposits like this in other areas of Mars."

Somehow I don't think getting sufficient water will be a problem for a martian colony. Harvesting that dune field alone would produce enough water to supply a massive colony site.

Know what else the rovers found? Ammonium salts at rock nest. The linked paper does give the caveat that the sample could be evolved methane and not reduced nitrogen, and suggests further study with the laser spectrometer. However, the gas form of nitrogen i

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

I see you that you do not understand the concept of the danger of perpetual growth!

Biological immortality would require, at the very least, oppressively controlled reproduction rights, or the planet would quickly become incapable of sustaining additional humans.

If you think the "One child per family" restriction of china is harsh, it has nothing on the harshness that would be required for sustainable population levels in the face of biological immortality. Mass sterilization at birth would practically be a necessity.

Which of us is the sociopath again?

Re:Uh, simple

[Alioth]

I suspect we'll figure out how to transfer the contents of a human mind to a machine before we have the means to colonize Mars. I have the feeling that manned Mars missions similar to the Moon missions are still decades off, and an actual colonization attempt would be nothing short of centuries off.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Similar arguments have been made over the entire history of mankind. A few centuries ago, I would expect highly intelligent people to have concluded that making reliable flying machines, and having reliable air transport of bulk goods between nations was simply too complicated to be possible, for the exact same line of reasoning you have just proposed.

And yet, we fly freight every day of the year, non-stop, and have whole industries that DEPEND on this.

The problems of today are the quaint footnotes in textbooks of tomorrow.

It's foolish to assert (like a certain AC), that simply because we cannot do something now, we will never (ever) be able to do that thing, and that thinking about how one could possibly do it in order to approach and solve those problems is "Nuttery" and "Religious faith."

You only TRULY fail, when you fail to try.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Ironic, trying to draw attention to a slight that the initiator already de-facto feels comfortable using himself-- ad-hominems.

Or do you have some alternative explanation for the "Whackackra-doodle-doo!" ?

Granted, two wrongs do not make a right, but implying that the AC is engaging in civil conversation is hardly being honest. It is quite clear that civil conversation is not what the AC is seeking.

Re:Uh, simple

[itzly]

Earth's crust is 5% iron. That's pure enough to make it cheaper than mining an asteroid. And unless you come up with amazing breakthroughs in technology, even mining gold on Earth is cheaper than an on asteroid.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

I dont think you are properly evaluating the effects of a very large asteroid.

A nuke does not burrow all the way into the upper mantle, and spew ejecta back into space on ballistic trajectories.

You know, like some of the earth crossing asteroids would cause if they actually, you know-- collided with our planet instead of just missing by skipping between the earth and the moon.

Here's something to help better educate you.
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/g...

It does not need to be the size of a planet. The 30 mile wide object referenced above would be sufficient to wipe out 90% of human populations, and seriously imperil the other 10%. Most modern humans are simply incapable of survival long-term without modern technology, and the 100ft tsunamis generated globally ALONE would have destroyed the vast majority of human life if it happened in recent times.

Comparing a large asteroid to conventional nukes is absurd. Even the crazy powerful ones made by the soviets as terror weapons pale in comparison.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Well since we're already using technology to live longer, I'd say you have to give up

- Running clean hot and cold water instead of dirty water
- Indoor plumbing instead of festering outhouses
- Air conditioned and insulated homes instead of drafty shacks
- Fridges full of sterile and nutritious food instead of hunting and gathering
- Cushy office jobs instead of back-breaking labor in the sun
- Pharmacies filled with skin creams and various potions
- Giving birth in hospitals
- Almost magical medical care (Seriously. Look at what medicine was 100 years ago)
- Antibiotics galore
- Medications for conditions previously considered "natural" aging now being controlled (strontium ranelate, AGE cross-link breakers)

Then I'll believe you're sincere.

" at the very least, oppressively controlled reproduction rights,"

As opposed to the freely controlled air and water you'd need on Mars? Great alternative, Sparky! You get a gold star for effort, but a bucket of shit for actual "thinking".

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

A human would have approximately 5 to 10 seconds in which to respond to the tear in their suit, and if repressurized within 60 seconds, have a fairly good chance of survival.

From the source:

Has Anybody Ever Survived Vacuum Exposure in Real Life?

Human experience is discussed by Roth, in the NASA technical report Rapid (Explosive) Decompression Emergencies in Pressure-Suited Subjects. Its focus is on decompression, rather than vacuum exposure per se, but it still has a lot of good information, including the results of decompression events involving humans.

There are several cases of humans surviving exposure to vacuum worth noting. In 1966 a technician at NASA Houston was decompressed to vacuum in a space-suit test accident. This case is discussed by Roth in the reference above. He lost consciousness in 12-15 seconds. When pressure was restored after about 30 seconds of exposure, he regained consciousness, with no apparent injury sustained.

Source:
http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...

The use of a form-fitting pressure suit, like that used by a fighter pilot (or those being demoed by MIT for use on mars, which have form-fitting metal coils to supply mechanical compression) would buy the suit occupant even more time in the event of a tear in the suit by preventing ebullism, and resulting drop in blood pressure, and resulting loss of consciousness.

There are a number of potential mechanisms that could be implemented into a space suit of the MIT type, that would make abrasion type holes in the suit less lethal, such as the non-newtonian silicon shear thickening liquid that is used in ballistic vests. A thin layer of this inside the suit would harden under the pressure being exerted on it by the occupant of the suit against the reduced pressure outside, exerted through the tear. This would reduce the effects of the hard vacuum on the suit occupant, buying more time to apply an appropriate patch to the suit.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

And that technological use has been strongly linked with a stark reduction in habitability of the planet, due to irreversable changes in the biosphere.

Swing batter. Swing,. (and I would happily live in a cave someplace, if only such well meaning people as yourself would actually allow it. )

Strike Two.

Shall we go for strike 3 AC?

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"since you jump to conclusions and treat actual scientific advances and data thrown at you as if it were fairytale fantasy."

No, no, when I see a clearer picture of a dead rock on Mars, I see a dead rock on Mars, you're the one sketching out the Mars condo, writing the Barsoomian Bill of Rights, and making two-screen posts that read like the ramblings of a lunatic.

I had to wipe your spittle off *my* monitor for crying out loud!

What's the definition of insanity? It's arguing the same tired old sci-fi clichés over and over again and expecting different results. You Space Nutters have been flogging all your space nonsense for decades now, with zippo, zilch, ZERO results.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, stupid realists and their stupid reality! How dare they! We're having a space erection over here!

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are no mountains made from pure gold, pure iridium, pure iron or pure coal.
However there are such asteroids." ....

(...)

???? ....

Wow. Seriously, wow. If anyone ever needs evidence that Space Nutters live in another dimension, there it is!

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of these questions were answered on a documentary on Netflix. Maybe the author should paid the $7.99 for a month so he could have done proper research on the subject instead of just guessing.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, and have a great day!"

Why thank you, I intend to have a 24 hour day with the correct air pressure and gas mix, at the right temperature and with food and water. Thank you!

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"And that technological use has been strongly linked with a stark reduction in habitability of the planet"

Yes, which is why we're 7 billion now and adding 200000 new people every day.

Yet you want to use that same technology to make Mars habitable.

"Shall we go for strike 3 AC?"

I think it's time to up your Haloperidol, clearly you've developed an astounding resistance to your meds!

Re:Uh, simple

[Gavagai80]

The leverage with which powerful people can control others on Mars would be undeniably much greater than on Earth. On Earth, you can flee on foot. You can hide in the amazon and become a hunter-gathered if you want. On Mars, if you're at odds with your colony leadership, you have to acquire spacesuits air food water building materials etc. Everyone will know where you are on a Mars base, and all they have to do to eliminate dissent is "accidentally" depressurize the compartment. Mars requires living together and depending on each other a great deal, and that lends itself to strong rules and strong leadership.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"What's the definition of insanity? It's arguing the same tired old sci-fi clichés over and over again and expecting different results. You Space Nutters have been flogging all your space nonsense for decades now, with zippo, zilch, ZERO results."

Calling people names is a great technique to discuss.

By the way hey said the same things about colonizing the "new world." Just because some people are too close minded and provincial to want to explore the future and not be stopped by luddites doesn't mean that it isn't a good goal.

You don't like it? Too bad, no one is asking you to go or (in this case) to pay for it, so but the %&$^ out. I'm not doing it, but that doesn't mean I don't support the people who want to do something new with their lives. If you can't get off your fat butt and do something new with your life at least don't sit on top of those who want to do it.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

Those who fail to dream and dream big get nowhere. But they can succeed by trying to stop those who do dream. It is none of their damn business if people want to support a manned mission to Mars.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

"By the way hey said the same things about colonizing the "new world.""

The "new world' that was already full of people and trees? How is that similar to Mars?

Insanity. We're way past the point of calling names, you guys keep coming up with the same tired fallacies, the same disproved arguments over and over and over again.

"to want to explore the future"

What does that even mean? There's nothing to "explore", we have pictures, thousands of them.

"You don't like it? Too bad, no one is asking you to go or (in this case) to pay for it, so but the %&$^ out. I'm not doing it, but that doesn't mean I don't support the people who want to do something new with their lives. If you can't get off your fat butt and do something new with your life at least don't sit on top of those who want to do it."

What does any of that have to do with thinking you can colonize Mars? Your argument can apply to anything, it's so general as to be meaningless.

Come on.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

He was quoting Star Trek NG - "Ugly bags of mostly water".

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

If, rather than allowing someone to answer you, you specify the bounds of that conversation by stating unacceptable answers, you clearly are not capable of participating in a conversation and did not want one to begin with.

Re:Uh, simple

[Eunuchswear]

political freedom for starters.

One thing you can be sure of about any colony in space.

No political freedom.

Re:Uh, simple

[Applehu Akbar]

I'll go with that silly 'spreading out the species' theme. Why don't all humans live in Hawaii, or on the African savanna to which we first adapted?

Mankind has a long history of spreading out from desirable places to places that at first are less desirable. We profoundly misunderstand our own creation myth. We invented clothing not out of shame but because it enabled us to leave our adapted environments and walk into the desert and the mountains and all the other rugged places that we colonized. Space is just the logical next step in that ancient progression. Based on history, I am certain that there are places out there that we will make our own.

Re:Uh, simple

[itzly]

So, why are there so few humans living on the Greenland ice sheet, the Gobi desert, or on the bottom of the oceans ? These places are all more hospitable than Mars.

Re:Uh, simple

[wired_parrot]

Yep. Being a pioneer is all about finding new and interesting ways to die ... or the old ways in new settings.

In all the examples you cited, the pioneers in question didn't set out on a one-way trip to die - they fully intended to live. The explorers who first went to the South Pole, Everest, and other terrestrial extremes all planned on a return trip. In fact, I'd say it was their will to live that drove them on. Most had family and children, and when faced with adversity did all they could to live and return to their loved ones. Shackleton did not intend to die in the South Pole, and thus he was driven to push his men to extremes to overcome his challenges. It was his will to live to drove him on.

If you send a group of people to Mars who signed up to what is essentially a suicide mission, will they show the same will to live that will drive to overcome the first life-or-death challenge they face, or will they just cross their arms and accept their fate? Someone psychologically ready to die is the last person you want in such a trip, or as your crewmate.

Re:Uh, simple

[Eunuchswear]

You body is a bag of water made of billions of bags of water: they will burst on contact with the vacuum of Mars.

Citation needed.

Wikipedia:

The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface averages 600 pascals, about 0.6% of Earth's mean sea level pressure of 101.3 kilopascals. This pressure is well below the Armstrong limit for the unprotected human body.

The Armstrong limit, is the altitude that produces an atmospheric pressure so low (6.3 kPa) that water boils at the normal temperature of the human body: 37 C

Re:Uh, simple

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Apart from the cold, there is no atmosphere, so exposure to the outside will cause ruptures in the cell walls, with consequent death directly after. You body is a bag of water made of billions of bags of water: they will burst on contact with the vacuum of Mars.

Turns out that this is not the case. On the order of 90 seconds total vacuum should not kill you if you get recompressed. Our skin is not just for looks, but provides significant protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Re:Uh, simple

[butalearner]

Infrastructure is a lot more complicated some pressure capsules and solar panels. Infrastructure to make a colony viable would mean agriculture and industry (including ways to deal with their negative externalities). Everything about both of those would need to be bootstrapped from Earth.

Even at SpaceX's best rates for the Falcon 9 and Dragon capsules at maximum capacity it would take over 14,000 launches to put those 100,000 colonists into orbit. That alone would cost a trillion dollars (assuming awesome rates from SpaceX and no failures). Just the structures and resources to keep those people alive for the first year would cost several tens of trillions of dollars more. The infrastructure to make an actual colony...well hopefully you get the picture. To put the numbers in better perspective we've only launched a little over 300 manned orbital missions in history. Ever.

A solid outline of the challenges, but a simplistic understanding of the proposed solutions. You don't put 100,000 colonists in orbit as fast as possible and put them to work building a metropolis on Mars. You put a few fertile and healthy couples on Mars at a time, over and over, and you grow the colony over hundreds of years. In fact, you grow several independent ones simultaneously, so one can evacuate to others in the event of an emergency. An additional 300 launches spread out over, say, six Earth-Mars launch windows (about 10 years) could mean 1200-1800 colonists, not counting any children they may have, and the infrastructure, agriculture, and industry involved in supporting those people would grow with the population. It would be heavily reliant on Earth for a long time, but that reliance could slowly disappear over time as Martian humans make do with what they can produce themselves, which could end up being a lot more than we can imagine with today's technology.

Of course, also on those timescales (centuries), the ability to recolonize Earth is questionable. Even the first human that grows up on Mars would have a great deal of trouble adapting to Earth, which would have three times his or her native gravity! They could probably do it with some fancy exoskeleton technology that might not exist yet, but their bones wouldn't be used to the stress at all, and they could easily have some crippling agoraphobia. But who knows what other adaptations the human body will undergo, given enough time. If anything, colonizing Mars is a stepping stone to a mostly space-faring civilization, but that's far, far into the future.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

By continue their "own" path you mean take our tax money and spend it on shit we don't care about?

Re:Uh, simple

[tehcyder]

That means that only people that would be willing to finance it are sociopaths.

And the only people that would be willing to go on the one way death trip would be psychotic.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

Something very simple that can and ought to be tested is simply the problems of sexual reproduction of placental mammals and simply getting that to be investigated. I can think of far more things that need to be studied as well. This is very fundamental and basic research that needs to take place.

Bootstrapping an industrial base is something that similarly can have some very positive benefits around the world, where the concepts on how to bootstrap an industrial society on Mars can also be done in Liberia, Somalia, or even Alaska and arguably even Detroit. I could see some real benefit to teaching children in high school or even middle school how to use tools that make tools and teaching them how to rebuild society if necessary, or at least as an educational experience to learn how things can be made.

Most of the things that still need to be done in terms of going to Mars don't cost that much money, but do take some substantial changes in attitude towards how things are done. I do like the fact that some people have started and are trying to pick off the low hanging fruit in terms of studying the effects of long term isolation or trying to figure out what kind of EVA missions will likely need to be done on Mars. Much more could be done though.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

In many cases the early explorers simply didn't even know what to expect. There were many sailors on the voyages of Christopher Columbus who died of scurvy, something that continued to persist for nearly a century even after many well established colonies existed in New Spain. The settlement of Jamestown in Virginia also died out largely due to malnutrition, in a region that is now a major agriculture production area I might add too. Some of the problems happened due to a failure of understanding of the environment, or that there were things they needed to know before hand but largely couldn't until they got there.

I'm afraid that much of the same situation will happen on Mars, there are things we simply don't know that can cause some problems. On the other hand, people discovered how to survive and thrive in those areas of the world where previously people died by the thousands. The cause of and the cure for Malaria was found eventually, a cure for scurvy was found by simply eating citrus fruit and eventually other solutions too, and in the long run the knowledge of all of these things have improved the lives for everybody.

Re:Uh, simple

[butalearner]

My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology.

If we were actually committed to the technology, we would never have to go ourselves. Sending human bodies implies a zealous commitment to a low tech solution frozen in time, like steam power in the age of electric cars. If we had the technology to make Mars comfortable we would have no need to do so, since martian robots will outstrip the utility of the human body by a country light year.

This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.

Some parts of our bodies are easier to replace than others. We have been replacing skin, blood, and bone (albeit imperfectly) for a long time. We are becoming better and better at replacing or removing parts of organs like kidneys, lungs, and even the heart. We are not even close to doing the same with our brains. We are starting to learn to do some awesome stuff with it, like control other people's limbs, and we may have even found the on-off switch for consciousness, but we can't replicate or replace the brain. We tried removing parts of it before, but even ignoring the horrid ethical violations, lobotomies had disastrous results and are no longer practiced.

Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely. I'll give you the idea that much of the human body is low tech, but our brains, though far from perfect, are more advanced than anything we've got.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

The gravity of Mars is only 2/3rds that of the Earth. Less than the Earth to be sure and could cause some problems, but the bones of people and their genetic stress loads were forged by evolutionary pressures here on the Earth. Perhaps a million or more years from now another species of the Homo genus that evolves from Homo Sapiens might live on Mars and have difficulty adapting to life on the Earth, but over the course of a few thousand years those living on Mars will have no problem at all in terms of returning back to the Earth. DNA just doesn't change that quickly.

Most definitely children who may be born on Mars in the 21st Century will have no problem returning to the land of their grandparents and taking a hike through the Grand Canyon or climbing the Alps. They may need some endurance training like is sort of the case for some inner city youth who don't get much physical exercise, but that is more the analogy that you would need to worry about.

Certainly don't apply lessons presumed for the birth of animals in a microgravity environment (aka on the ISS) to what is going to happen for those creatures born on Mars. Such studies haven't even been done yet. Yes, I am making a presumption here that all will be fine but I am making the assumption that this is something controlled by DNA, not by gravity. Placental mammals in particular are nurtured in a neutral buoyancy environment before birth, which is why I really doubt that especially gestational development matters much in terms of the gravitational environment they are developed in. Ditto for kids raised on Mars, other than they will develop a very healthy respect for air locks or face Darwinian selection for screwing around with those kind of dangerous parts of their living space.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotInHere]

Bootstrapping an industrial base is something that similarly can have some very positive benefits around the world, where the concepts on how to bootstrap an industrial society on Mars can also be done in Liberia, Somalia, or even Alaska and arguably even Detroit.

My thoughts, too.

One aspect we have to think of however are wars. EU for example was a project to make the industries of european countries dependent on each other, so that they can't make wars against each other. BTW thats the reason EU got the nobel peace prize, not because of frontex. So while I think that finding a fast way to bootstrap an industrialized civilisation is important for getting (and surviving) on mars, we could get problems at home. But you can't stop progress, so we will have to find a way to solve earth's war problem somehow else.

Re:Uh, simple

[Applehu Akbar]

Because those are places that are conspicuously less attractive than surrounding territory, of course.

Each new wave of human colonization starts from a higher technological base than the ones before it. When mid-19th century Gold Rush miners first developed small areas of the northern California mountains, most of the state was uninhabitable by the standards of that time, even as great wealth was being mined from the gold country itself. San Francisco started as the Gold Rush port, but it was not until the O'Shaughnessy Dam was built in the early 1900s that it could expand into a large city. Even after that, it took generations of infrastructure building to create a California that could hold forty million people.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

You will not be able to pay the cost of your transfer to Mars (including the tons of food and supplies needed to keep you alive there).

Elon Musk has suggested the cost of a round-trip passage to Mars is likely going to cost about $500k. That may seem like a whole lot, but it is comparable in price for somebody from a modern 1st world country to what people were paying in the 18th Century for passage to European colonies in terms of needing to literally sell everything they had including their house, save up for years, and then put all of that money on the line for a trip to the colonies.

As for the "tons of supplies needed to keep you alive there", only the first few colonists are going to need that mountain of supplies. Even then, such colonies will simply fail unless they are able to use local resources to produce literally everything they are going to need for survival. Food and the air that everybody will breathe on Mars will by necessity need to come from local resources and can't be reasonably brought from the Earth. Other supplies like clothing, toiletries, and even building materials for shelters will much sooner than later need to come from local materials as well, and will be required to come from local materials once more than a dozen or so people are on Mars.

It will not be like the Apollo missions when people go to Mars.

As for money on Mars, I'm sure the people who will live on Mars will figure out a currency among themselves for the allocation of scarce resources. Your presumption that there will be no means to "make money" simply shows a lack of understanding of economics.

I don't even know how to respond to the rest of your essay here. Mars has more area to roam upon than the land area of the Earth. I'm sure that is plenty of room for various kinds of political philosophies, from hardcore communism to libertarian utopias and everything in between. It won't be easy to do any of this, and mistakes will be made. If you don't want to be involved, I don't mind nor should you be required to pay for any of it (in my opinion). Just stay the hell away from me or anybody else who tries to do this is all I ask.

Re:Uh, simple

[RobotBorg]

I was listing all the end of the world scenarios and judging how useful a Mars colony would be to ensure the continuity of the human species. I wasn't comparing them.

As to asteroids: 90% of life wiped out, tsunamis and tech is destroyed, a dark day for mankind. But all of that is no better for people living on Mars - unless we are hypothesizing this Mars colony is sufficiently prosperous it can bring disaster relief. So long as some few thousand of us survive, our species continues and the Mars colony doesn't do us a lick of good. And at least a few thousand will certainly survive - the K-Pg extinction event was survived by many animals vastly less adaptable, resourceful, numerous and spread out than modern man. The only scenario were this isn't true and an asteroid is a real existential threat to humanity is a extremely *massive* impact. Something that liquefies the Earth's crust as the Theia impact is hypothesized to have done. In that case, yes having a Mars colony is essential to our species continuing.

Though all this talk of the Chicxulub event reminds me that I missed another end of the world scenario:

Mass volcanism. It's theorized the Toba volcano eruption reduced early man to a few thousand stragglers on the edge of Africa around 70000 BC. Although a similar event wouldn't doom modern man, something like the Permian Siberian Traps eruption probably would. However, the Traps eruption is theorized to have taken over a million years to happen - ample time to found Mars colonies if and when we need them.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Translation:

It's too much for me to actually research this issue, so I will make some shit up about how the prior poster is clearly batshit for pointing out that there are whole classifications of asteroid that are nearly completely pure metal, and that the composition of these objects ranges from 15% iron-nickel alloy to near 100% iron-nickel alloy.

Instead I will focus on how the OP stated that there are asteroids made of solid cold, and focus on how battshit that is! Nevermind that even really old USGS circulars cite the average gold content of meteorites between .0003 PPM and 8.74PPM, with the average gold concentration of earth's crust being between .001 PPM and .006 PPM , which indicates that careful candidate screening would produce far richer old ores than can be obtained here on earth! That's not important! HE'S A SPACE NUTTER!

He's such a nutter! Hoo boy! See everybody, See me shout it from the rooftop? He's a NUTTER, A NUTTER!

I said it, and said it again, that makes it true! TRUE I SAID! TRUE!

Oh gawd, it's wierd again! The KING space nutter! AND HE'S BRINGING SCIENCE IN ON THIS! OMG! SUPER SPACE NUTTER! SPAAAACE NUUTTTER! (Did I get enough vapid spittle in that?)

Seriously AC- YOU are the one who sounds like the true believer. No amount of plausibility study will ever dislodge your diehard faith that humans will never get off this rock, and because of your faith, you want to sabotage others that lack your convictions, all so you can (Maybe, sorta) get something that you want that is at best equally improbable (A happy future leisure-society utopia, from your own admission) and at worst delusionally impossible (Since you hand-wave away all the consequences of your proposal as being solvable by mystery science, even when real scientists outright say that this is not possible, and that expecting science and technology to just whisk it away is not being realistic, and then have the gall to claim being a realist.)

So go ahead, demonize me some more. Hurl more poorly structured ad hominems my way. Repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true-- Maybe if you keep huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf, and laughing like a hyena on nitrous oxide, you will eventually have a cerebreal embolism and spare us all the misery of your continued postings.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.

Non sequitur. If we don't need the rest of the human body on mars, it's implied that we don't need the human brain either.

Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely.

The unconvincing part is the explaining why we should be expending the effort at all. In short, a mars colony is like a monorail, a popsicle skyscraper, and escalator to nowhere. If you actually articulate a reason for going to mars, it turns out this is either something that can be done more easily by a robot, or by an earth bound solution.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

even mining gold on Earth is cheaper than an on asteroid.

You are aware that many of the mineral deposits on the Earth that have high quantities of rare minerals likely have an extra terrestrial origin. In other words, companies have been mining asteroids for decades already.

What you miss in your presumption that it is so easy to get minerals from the crust of the Earth is that you have to deal with a constant 10 m/s^2 acceleration for stuff you do here on the Earth. Most of the really easy to reach deposits have already been exploited on the Earth, so what is happening now are activities to extract those resources by digging down deeper into the crust or literally removing whole mountains to get at that stuff. It isn't cheap or nearly so easy as you are suggesting.

Rio Tinto, to give an example of an existing mining company here on the Earth, already spends many billions of dollars simply to open up a basic mining operation to extract simple resources like copper or gold. Such deposits that can be done productively in that same manner are increasingly hard to find as well I might add. No doubt there are still as of yet undiscovered major deposits of some of these minerals, but surface minerals that can be easily mined and sorted out to various elements in not nearly as easy as you are suggesting either. If you can find a deposit of iron that is 5% or so in concentration, there are several companies I could point to right now that would buy that land and dig it up.... if that was easily obtained from surface extraction methods.

My point is that building a mining operation on an asteroid with current technology for spaceflight is on roughly the same scale of costs as is needed now for doing a terrestrial mining operation for much poorer quality of raw materials. Many of the asteroids that can be mined practically pass right by the Earth, and in a few cases even pass between the Earth & the Moon. Those can be efficiently mined in total, where some of them definitely have minerals far more concentrated in some rare elements than is the case on the Earth. Those will be the first extraterrestrial mining targets.

Of course one of the most valuable minerals in space right now is simply ordinary water, usually in the form of ice. It is cheaper and easier to capture ice from the outer Solar System or even from passing comets than it is to launch it from the Earth. That happens to be the business plan for Planetary Resources, who unfortunately lost their first spacecraft in the explosion of the Antares rocket built by Orbital Science. They have actual hardware going into space, which should show they are serious about the idea and are willing to spend some big bucks to get there.

It will really be the market place that will decide if it is worth the cost of mining asteroids or not, and I will find it interesting to see what people pontificating about this concept will say a century from now. I don't think those space-based mining operators need to be subsidized either, and some people with money are trying to make it happen regardless of what you think about the idea.

Re:Uh, simple

[NotSanguine]

By continue their "own" path you mean take our tax money and spend it on shit we don't care about?

I know. All those fuckers wasting American tax dollars.when we could be spending them on important things.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

If it was certain that we as a species need to leave the Earth in 5-10 years or face complete extinction, we would need to make some significant changes in political policy in regards to a number of different things. Luckily, that isn't the case and the general presumption is that we have many centuries left before a civilization collapse, much less a mass extinction event.

On the other hand, should we, collectively, be spending about the same level of resources toward potentially saving the species by moving a portion of mankind to another planet as is currently being spent on lipstick or shaving cream? I think that sounds like a reasonable proposition. Let's at least do that and get say one or two people out of ten thousand working on that problem or contributing resources to such an endeavor.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

If people complain about being able to "afford it" now, how do you intend for them to "afford it" when resources are literally at the breaking point?

Staying alive to see tomorrow would take significant priority over scrounging up and refining enough metal and fuel to launch even a single rocket into space under those conditions-- let alone building an entire martian colony.

This is one of those things that needs to happen when times are good, not when times are bad.

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Oh, I'm the one who needs to be on psychoactive meds?

You DO realize that the argument you just made:

"Yes, which is why we're 7 billion now and adding 200000 new people every day."

Distills down to "Yes, there's a problem and we are ignoring it, and so far we havent died yet, so we can just continue to ignore it-- because past performance is an indicator of future performance! Except that it isnt!"

Especially since in just the past century, when the vast majority of this high technology has risen, atmospheric CO2 levels have risen sharply, and mean global temperature has gone up with it, and shows no signs of stopping or being reduced, and that basically every reputable climate scientist on the planet agrees that even if 100% of human industrial output stopped overnight, the coming ecological catastrophe could not be averted. Yes, adding 200,000 new people every day is perfectly a 'Sensible' thing to do. Clearly.

At least on mars, adding gasses to the atmosphere, any gasses at all, would only make the planet MORE habitable-- and research on how to make crops and industry work in such a hellhole would at least buy some insurance for the now inevitable future for earth, thanks to people like yourself.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

Elon Musk has suggested the cost of a round-trip passage to Mars is likely going to cost about $500k.

The gravity on Mars is such that a stay there of any duration (say, 12 earth months) will mean returning to earth will kill you. There won't be any return trips.

That may seem like a whole lot, but it is comparable in price for somebody from a modern 1st world country to what people were paying in the 18th Century for passage to European colonies in terms of needing to literally sell everything they had including their house, save up for years, and then put all of that money on the line for a trip to the colonies.

We now realise that 18th century colonists were actually moving to lands which were already occupied. They were tourists and immigrants - no equivalence with settling another planet.

As for the "tons of supplies needed to keep you alive there", only the first few colonists are going to need that mountain of supplies. Even then, such colonies will simply fail unless they are able to use local resources to produce literally everything they are going to need for survival.

Then the "colony" will fail. Have you seen a long wall miner? An aluminium smelter?

As for money on Mars, I'm sure the people who will live on Mars will figure out a currency among themselves for the allocation of scarce resources. Your presumption that there will be no means to "make money" simply shows a lack of understanding of economics.

That's what I said. There is n o way to make anything on mars, and nothign will grow - implies that the economy wil be entirely based on the things that are brought from Earth. Mars = communism.

I don't even know how to respond to the rest of your essay here.

Ideally, you wouldn't respond with baseless assertions.

Mars has more area to roam upon than the land area of the Earth.

Stop being absurd. Mars is bathed in deadly radiation. People won't habitually go outside, unless there is an emergency. Life on mars is lived inside. Imagine living six to a shipping container. That's Mars.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

And what happens after 90 seconds?

Maybe you could use this as an ad for a future mars colony: "Mars: Live Painfully for a minute and a half!"

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Martian condo? Really? Is that what you think?

Clearly, we are not even discussing the same things at all. Clearly you think I am advocating space hotels on mars, when really I am advocating the bare essentials for colonists to survive there.

Would there eventually be hotels on mars?

Only if the colony gets built first.

Your position is a self fulfilling prophecy-- We never go to mars, ever, so of course, there is never going to be a mars colony!

The problem, is that you make this an absurdity, by then asserting "because we will never go to mars, we dont need to make a mars colony!"

In short, you are suffering from circular logic, and are in fact the deluded one. ;P

Re:Uh, simple

[wierd_w]

Given that you yourself are making similarly baseless assertions based on confirmation biases, I find the solidity of your arguments to be in question.

Rather than handwave about how long haul mining and aluminum smelting somehow instantly kills people doing it, (a proposition that would mean that the aluminium cans used to ship soda are made in a process that systemically ends human lives, which is an absurdity in itself- There are industrial accidents and risks of exposure, yes-- but more people die in car crashes and from inhaling carbon monoxide from faulty domestic heaters than die in smelter related incidents-- which is a statement that can be supported on demand with actual statistics, collected by real social scientists.)

So please, if you are holding out on some actually substantive basis for your condemnation, by all means, share it with the rest of the class.

Otherwise, please follow your own advice.

Re:Uh, simple

[angel'o'sphere]

This is not insightful, this is stupid.

There is no pure iron on earth at all! It is most certainly bound with oxygen into various forms of iron oxides or in other iron ores. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

OTOH there are pure iron asteroids.

Regarding cost: ofc it is cheaper, that is not the point. The question is ROI.

If you can capture an iron asteroid of roughly 100m size, that would be something as 32672563597kg or 32672563tons of iron. Or: 32,6 million metric tons. That is the amount of steel (yes steel is not iron) Turkey produced in 2013.

Imho the question is: is it worth to capture one and land its minerals on earth. Perhaps not. However using the minerals to start a space based industry makes sense imho.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

You know. I tried to write a calm, and sensible reply to this poisoned barb you have thrown at me, and I just couldn't do it.

The fact that you engage with this discussion emotionally and respond with a long, rambling and self-contradictory screed should signal to you that your view of mars colonisation is based on emotion rather than reason. I have no reason to respect the subjective demands of your emotions above the objective concerns that arise from reason. It's up to you to make a convincing argument. If you are not prepared for the rigours associated with other people questioning your beliefs, then you should not publically express them until you ARE ready to debate calmly.

1) You make the mistake in asserting that people leaving earth as political asylum seekers would be doing so without something already being there. Even the puritans didnt leave england en-mass until AFTER the colonies in north america were fully settled and productive. --What you are are failing to grasp, is that there would not be such a place to go, if nobody makes the damned colony; The puritans would never have left england, because the colonists never would have preceded them. Did all the irish people fleeing ireland after the potato fammine come with metric fucktons of food and other things? No-- they sold themselves into indentured servitude to come here, with just the clothes on their backs. Why? because there was a means of producing food over here already.

I put it to you that YOU are making that mistake. There is nothing on Mars. Therefore, by your own admittance, Mars is unsuitable for colonisation. By your own admittance, we've never successfully implemented the strategy you advocate, even on earth, with it's comparative wealth of resources and freedom of movement. Why should I believe that such a plan could be successful on Mars?

There is nothing inconsistent with wishing to create a colony, with the intention of permitting political asylum once it is able to accept such persons.

It follows then, that we could also create such a colony on earth.

As bad as things are for us in the west at the moment, things are far worse for others.Therefore when considering the need to establish a refuge for those seeking political asylum our minds turn to those who currently seek political asylum with us and under our (certainly flawed) democratic system. How do these people seek asylum on Mars? How do the Karen, the Tamil, the Hazara, the Uighur people get passage to Mars?

If you understand the means to create a fair and just society then by all means express those principles. I think you don't. I think you want to merely repeat the mistakes of the past, where people fled oppression with a view to creating a fair and just society, and inevitably ended in oppression once more.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

Given that you yourself are making similarly baseless assertions based on confirmation biases, I find the solidity of your arguments to be in question.

Rather than address my assertions, you attempt a burden of proof fallacy. If you think my assertion: The gravity on Mars is such that a stay there of any duration (say, 12 earth months) will mean returning to earth will kill you. There won't be any return trips. is incorrect, then say so. Don't wave your hands over it.

Rather than handwave about how long haul mining and aluminum smelting somehow instantly kills people doing it, (a proposition that would mean that the aluminium cans used to ship soda are made in a process that systemically ends human lives, which is an absurdity in itself- There are industrial accidents and risks of exposure, yes-- but more people die in car crashes and from inhaling carbon monoxide from faulty domestic heaters than die in smelter related incidents-- which is a statement that can be supported on demand with actual statistics, collected by real social scientists.)

Learn to read.

So please, if you are holding out on some actually substantive basis for your condemnation, by all means, share it with the rest of the class.

By which you mean, the one person. By my reckoning, there are 200000 people with enough belief in a mars colony to put money on it. That is a vanishingly small group. You won't get there without convincing the other 8 000 000 000 of us that such an idea has merit. So convince us.

Re:Uh, simple

[KeensMustard]

So in essence, a simple tear in your suit on Mars means you have 60 seconds to live. Sounds like a life we can all aspire to.

If you are outside, there will be a brief, desperate struggle to apply a patch to the tear, if it is small enough and you can reach it (unlikely), and you haven't fallen down a hole and lying stunned or unconscious.

Consequently few, if any, excursions would occur outside of the pressurised habitat on Mars.

Re:Uh, simple

[Teancum]

The gravity on Mars is such that a stay there of any duration (say, 12 earth months) will mean returning to earth will kill you. There won't be any return trips.

There is absolutely no scientific research to show this is true. It simply hasn't even been done. For crying out loud, there are people who will be going into the ISS to stay there for more than a year in basically a microgravity environment for that length of time. I'm not saying there will be zero impact, but it seems highly unlikely that 12 months of living on Mars is going to make it impossible to return to the Earth.

At the very least, cite your source of info. When living on Mars, you will still need to have your heart pump extra hard climbing stairs or doing other forms of physical exertions that simply is not true for people on the ISS, and there have not been human-sized centrifuges capable of simulating Martian acceleration.

Mars is bathed in deadly radiation.

So is the Earth. Perhaps they will need to dig down a little bit, and being on Mars will certainly be better than sitting inside of a spaceship under any circumstance. Radiation is not the big problem you make it out to be and are demonizing a problem that already exists even on the Earth. It is a problem already being addressed by spacecraft construction and something dealt with literally daily by those on the ISS. Of all of the problems that are going to face settlers on Mars, radiation is the one thing that everybody already knows how it will be dealt with and how it can be compensated for by those going to Mars.

It is also one problem that can also abundantly be dealt with by building shelters with local materials.

BTW, Aluminum smelters may very well show up on Mars and be there sooner than later. Mars is also covered with silica in various forms, so glass is also something that can be made with local materials. The problems you are posting here are sort of just getting downright silly at this point.

Re:Uh, simple

[whathappenedtomonday]

I want people to get off this planet.

Why?

It's the updated version of get off my lawn.

Re:Uh, simple

[david_thornley]

We're not going to solve a bunch of problems and launch a bunch of stuff and have a thriving industrial economy in space by 2050. Barring breakthroughs I don't expect, it will take a long time, perhaps centuries, and proceed step by slow step Small problems can be solved, one at a time. In the meantime, we'll be slowly pushing capabilities into LEO, and from there we can use much more efficient rockets..

Re:Uh, simple

[david_thornley]

Why would you expect major disasters in 5-10 years? We've gone a LONG time without any disaster that wasn't more or less local, and there's no reason to expect one in the near future.

Moreover, we can't possibly set up a self-sustaining colony off-planet in ten years. If we expected a death asteroid in ten years, the best idea would be to see about defending Earth from it.

Re:Uh, simple

[Anonymous Coward]

You're beyond help.

Re:Uh, simple

[whereiswaldo]

We got lucky with the last meteor strike in Russia. It came from one direction we weren't looking in - the direction of the Sun. Had the asteroid been of extinction-level size, we'd be history since we had no idea it was coming.
You need to balance the odds of something happening against the impact if it does happen: A miniscule chance of an extinction event matched against the annihilation of all life on Earth means it should be a high priority for our species to take steps to avoid that disaster. If we fail, we won't get a second chance.
I agree that defending Earth against an asteroid is a reasonable idea, but that will only help against objects small enough for us to handle with our current technology and also those we can detect in time to take action against.

Re:Uh, simple

[david_thornley]

When was the last time all life on Earth was destroyed? It doesn't seem to have happened in a billion years or so.

We will survive normal extinction-level events, because we're smart, tough, widespread, and adaptable. (Heck, we are an extinction-level event.) Those happen every few hundred million years or so.

It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

The minute they said there was an application fee it should have been obvious.

That, plus the tiny size of the team, the handwaving away of all technical problems to subcontractors, and the bizarre funding ideas, should have warned people off long ago. Sadly the regular newsmedia, in their admirable efforts to publish fun and interesting science storise, were duped.

Re:It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, Space Nutters are adept at duping themselves. They think because they're intelligent in one domain, typically software, that their intelligence transfers to all scientific and engineering disciplines.

The romantic, grandiose visions of the Space Age Priests

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

combined with the NASA propaganda (and Russians too, obviously) has resulted in entire generations stunted by ridiculous notions about space.

Space is hugely empty and deadly. This planet is where we are and where we will all be. There's no magical warp drives or Death Asteroids hiding behind Jupiter, there's no one getting ready to mine asteroids to get the same resources we have here (prices are falling recently!)..

There's no aliens waiting to share their wisdom or steal our water, there's no cosmic guiding force pulling us to the stars. That's as absurd as wanting to dig to the center of the Earth because that yellow sphere you saw in books as a kid looks like it could taste like lemon meringue.

It's over, finished, done. The Space Age is in the past. Brush your hand over its eyelids, make your sign of the cross and zip up the body bag and slam the morgue door closed. None of the Space Age dreams will happen.

Ever.

So stop flogging that horse and get with the program, there are plenty of real, HARD actual problems that need solving right here and now!

Remember that Kennedy speech about doing it "because it's hard"?

Well?

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sadly, Space Nutters are adept at duping themselves. They think because they're intelligent in one domain, typically software, that their intelligence transfers to all scientific and engineering disciplines."

You just described 99% of Slashdot, possibly yourself included.

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Well? I agree.

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is I make no extraordinary claims.

I don't say: "I have a fast oscilloscope! Therefore Mach 3 private passenger transport is inevitable!"

See? Why are you guys so eager to throw out the scientific method and Occam's Razor as soon as space is mentionned?

You: "Computers got better! Therefore we will colonize Mars!"

Get it yet?

I'm like: "Guess what? There's nothing out there and getting there is incredibly difficult. Send machines, and work smarter here cuz they're aren't any second chances and space won't rescue us."

And I'm probably the only Canadian that doesn't care about Chris Hadfield. The guy's a yes-man type-A test pilot who rides in a tin can in the upper atmosphere. So what? My garbageman does more for the human race than this test monkey.

And now let's watch Space Derangement Syndrome kick in!!!

Re:It's a scam

[ChuckDivine]

Anonymous Coward,

There is much truth in what you write. I got involved in this crowd back in the 1970s after reading Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. It was a thought provoking, impressive book. My involvement, though, was moderate and independent. While, at the beginning of my interest, I wanted to get to L5 by 95, I eventually realized that it would not be L5 by 1995 but more like L5 by 2495. O'Neill made significant proposals that appealed to me. Instead of adventure trips to the Moon or Mars, he -- and others -- proposed doing things like building space based solar power satellites to benefit humans on Earth. They are still in the future, but could come about in the future. There are many problems to solve, though.

Sending people to Mars? Let's see. Mars does not have a geomagnetic sphere to protect it from solar outbursts. People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens Martian atmosphere is very thin. At ground level atmospheric pressure is only 1% of Earth. That is not nearly enough. Martian gravity is less than half of Earth's. Is that enough? We shall have to experiment.

There is one place on Earth that explorers have explored since we have had written records -- Antarctica. It wasn't even discovered until 1820. The first expedition to Antarctica was the Scott expedition a century ago. We started building bases there after World War 2. Quite a few humans have now lived there -- at least for a short time. Same gravity, same atmosphere, same geomagnetic sphere. Just much colder.

The optimist in me thinks we humans will, eventually, live and work in places other than Earth. It is going to take a good bit of learning, though.

Enough for now.

Re:It's a scam

[roc97007]

Wow, all you needed was the trope that the moon landings were faked by the US government to bring down the Soviet empire, and that's the entire parent/teacher conference from Interstellar. Minus the engineer's retort, of course.

Re:It's a scam

[roc97007]

I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere, and you can't reasonably expect the first try to succeed.

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Great! So where do we start? A leisure society that distributes our fantastic resources equitably among the 7 billion plus humans already here? Toppling dictatorships, removing psychopaths from power, getting money hoarders to let go, improve our cities and food access?

Lots of hard things to do right here!!

Oh what's that? You prefer escaping to your comic books and Star Trek boxed set?

Re:It's a scam

[PopeRatzo]

Sadly, Space Nutters are adept at duping themselves. They think because they're intelligent in one domain, typically software, that their intelligence transfers to all scientific and engineering disciplines.

This part is true.

Experts tend to believe their expertise extends to all fields. (See, "Neil deGrasse Tyson")

Re:It's a scam

[Charliemopps]

The minute they said there was an application fee it should have been obvious.

That, plus the tiny size of the team, the handwaving away of all technical problems to subcontractors, and the bizarre funding ideas, should have warned people off long ago. Sadly the regular newsmedia, in their admirable efforts to publish fun and interesting science storise, were duped.

I doubt it's a "Scam"
If it were, they could have been a lot cleverer and gotten a lot more money.
I do think it's a bunch of well meaning people that will at some point, if they haven't already, realize they just got a shit-ton of money from a lot of people in a lot of countries that have a lot of laws... and they might not be able to pull this off... and it's inevitable that one of those laws in one of those countries will involve caning, hard labor or sex with large bikers... at which point they will vanish overnight and leave this looking pretty much like it was a scam... so oh, never-mind, just assume its a scam, the result will be the same either way.

Re:It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

"People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens"
Nah, it'll be about 13 minutes later when it gets to mars that it'll be a problem :P.

Re:It's a scam

[putaro]

There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.

We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.

Re: It's a scam

[AJWM]

I'm not sure whether it's the coward that's speaking -- you're afraid of space and think everyone else should be, so you'll feel better about yourself -- or that as a Canadian you recognize that you'll probably never have a chance to go to space yourself and it's all just sour grapes.

I'm leaning towards the former, since that's how you sign yourself.

But sure, keep telling yourself that it's everybody else that's crazy, if that's what comforts you.

Re:It's a scam

[AJWM]

Hi Chuck, long time no see.

Mars does not have a geomagnetic sphere to protect it from solar outbursts. People will die if they are on the surface when one of those things happens

People will die if they're out on the surface of Earth unprotected, for large parts of Earth (deserts, arctic, oceans, etc). We manage ... and sometimes we lose a few.

. It is going to take a good bit of learning, though.

Of course it's going to take a good bit of learning. Fortunately that's something we humans tend to be good at (with a few obvious exceptions). We conquered the deserts, the arctic and the oceans with pretty much neolithic technology, after all.

Re: It's a scam

[Artifakt]

I'm a big fan of every single one of these things you mention, from more leisure, to equitable resource distribution, to political and social sanity in general. I'd add some things like educating many more people much closer to their true potential, moving away from a permanent wartime economy, curing the vast bulk of unaddressed diseases and finding the answers to a great number of fundamental mysteries of science. However, all these things make a good case for a counter-argument.
            This is, all of the economic models we widely use seem to run counter to achieving every single one of those things. Dismissing the "space-nutters" on any grounds relating to economy means we are using the same tools that seem to prove we can't have a more leisure focused society (or even to count a 30 hr .week as fulltime for any benefits). It's using the same tools that are moving us constantly away from equitable resource distribution, to 'prove' that what the 'space nutters' want doesn't make sense. It's letting failed ideas such as gave us trickle-down economics and perpetual austerity tell us what, if anything, we can do in space.
              That's one reason I'm putting 'nutters' in single quotes. We should preserve some respect for them, because it is quite possible that if we came up with computer algorythms for food distribution that were a tremendous step towards making sure everyone got enough to eat, the same sort of math might show that the cost benefit ratios of something like a Mars colony made a lot more sense than we thought. I keep remembering the economic arguments against high speed trains in the USA, that 'show' high speed rail doesn't work in any of those other countries that ARE making it work either., or all the puffery about why the USA can't have nice internet because it only works for densely populated nations such as Canada, or ones that don't have cold weather like Japan and Korea, or whatever BS it is this week. Until we start moving solidly toward at least some of these planet-side goals we are discussing, we may never be able to realistically judge just how nutty a given goal in space really is, or isn't.

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

"you're afraid of space"

Baffling response. How does that follow from *anything* I've said? I also said that no one is going to dig to the center of the Earth, does that mean I'm "afraid" of the center of the Earth? No, I'm just saying we have no technology to dig that far and in any case if we did, we'd be dead when we get there.

Space is empty, might as well be afraid of a CRT or the inside of a Thermos.

I know that in your simplistic black and white world you can't manage much nuance, but come on, make an effort.

"or that as a Canadian you recognize that you'll probably never have a chance to go to space yourself "

And that's different from the other 7 billion how? You think Branson or Musk are going to whisk you to Mars if you suck their dick long enough?

"sour grapes"???

We don't even have Concorde anymore! Jesus wept, man! And you're fantasizing about MARS!!???

Try some REALITY! You're the one who's afraid to face the reality that space is DEAD! It's OVER! FINISHED!

No one's going. End of story!

You wanna know WHY that scares you? Because you're a deeply dysfunctional, depressed, misanthropic nerd who has no friends so you think Blorg is gonna come sweep you away in his flying saucer and take you to Andromeda where all the other autistic fuckwits live!

Re:It's a scam

[SourceFrog]

Do you think that if they get the funding they need they don't intend to follow through? If not, then in what sense is it a "scam"? That is not what the word "scam" means.

Re:It's a scam

[KeensMustard]

I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere,

My position is that this is like saying that an ice block is the first step toward building a popsicle skyscraper. If end goal is unjustified, then so are the intermediate steps.

Re:It's a scam

[roc97007]

I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere,

My position is that this is like saying that an ice block is the first step toward building a popsicle skyscraper. If end goal is unjustified, then so are the intermediate steps.

I don't think the end goal is unjustified, but even if it is, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.

Re: It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you come up with some new schtick? Something like this

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Because you're tiresome, and you never even made me smile once. At least the crude humor of the dork monster is funny once.

Re:It's a scam

[KeensMustard]

Broken window fallacy.

, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.

The same could be said of a popsicle skyscraper. Such an undertaking would inevitably result in technological advances.

Re:It's a scam

[roc97007]

Broken window fallacy.

, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.

The same could be said of a popsicle skyscraper. Such an undertaking would inevitably result in technological advances.

Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.

Re:It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your thoughts on us AI and Human Augmentation nutters? No intrinsic problem with doing it, and no laws of physics that have to be violated. Its neuroscience and engineering. For spaceflight in particular, An AI/Uploaded Human (not really much difference at that point) could withstand more Gs, could hibernate itself, doesn't need any consumables, is not nearly as sensitive to radiation, and if not limited to a physical substrate could be beamed to another physical location at light speed. If it is a clanking replicator (cells have to be made in a factory) it would ta

Humans won't be the ones who colonize the universe. whatever comes after us on the otherhand...

Re:It's a scam

[KeensMustard]

Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.

Honestly speaking: These proposals for a Mars colony *are* goofy. They *are* extreme.

Re:It's a scam

[roc97007]

Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.

Honestly speaking: These proposals for a Mars colony *are* goofy. They *are* extreme.

There is room for more than one opinion on this. I would agree that it's challenging, perhaps impossible. But I certainly don't begrudge someone the chance to try.

Re:It's a scam

[KeensMustard]

This is merely empty.

I put it to you that a Mars colony, to be justifiable, must be justifiable on objective grounds. There are lot's of goofy ideas. Hence the popsicle skyscraper. "Because we want to", "because it's there" justify all goofy ideas equally.

Re:It's a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

From my extensive experience as mayor of multiple successful simcities, i can ay all you need is zone a few light density residential areas, people will move in.
just my my 2 simoleons

Re:It's a scam

[painandgreed]

I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere, and you can't reasonably expect the first try to succeed.

And that start is the ISS. They are doing the beginnings of the work and research that will be needed to get to Mars. Later will probably come a larger ISS type station because there is a lot of work that needs to be done before we venture into space. Later, we'll need a deep space version to test living outside of the protective magnetic shield of the Earth. Then probably some trips to the moon and even a moon base. Then, we can realistically look at some sort of fly by and landing on Mars.

At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[Beck_Neard]

It really is an example of the effects of authority and herd behavior. They first approached a number of prominent science/tech figures and asked them to endorse it. Turns out, if you approach a large enough number of people with a crazy idea, a few will by chance support it, especially if you keep the details hidden. Then this was enough for the avalanche of followers and news reports to start.

Do we have the technology to get to Mars? Depends on who you ask. NASA already has the plans on the drawing board. They just don't have the money. And that's the sticking point. There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.

Re:At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[phantomfive]

There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.

And even $100billion sounds optimistic.

Re:At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[Provocateur]

Hey Kardashians vs. Martians (Kim, Kanye, Chloe and the whole gang vs. the costumed winners of American ninja warrior) might pull in that kind of advertising revenue)

Re:At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[SourceFrog]

Just some long-term thinking here: A point to remember is that the first trip would be the most expensive. If the first trip to Mars costs $100 billion, the second one would cost only a fraction of that, as then all the technologies would have been developed, and we'd have the requisite body of expertise.

Re:At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[captainpanic]

There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.

No? The 2014 winter Olympics cost over 50 billion. The London Olympics cost over 14 billion. I am confident that the first Mars mission is at least 10 times as interesting to an advertiser as the Olympics. Imagine a Mars explorer opening a cold Coca Cola bottle a few minutes after landing. That's worth Coca cola's entire annual advertising budget (which is 3 billion), because they can use that in so many other advertisements. The first walk outside on Martian soil, wearing a sponsored space suit will generate billions in advertising money. There are plenty of advertising possibilities, because a show like that would basically cover some people's lives. They wear clothes, they live somewhere, they eat and drink, clean themselves, etc...

There are enormous technical problems to be solved... but large corporations will be very interested to have their names mentioned... Five times as much is spent every year on advertisements (global market is 489 billion).

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://news.magnaglobal.com/ip...

Re:At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[Beck_Neard]

The Olympic Games are funded through public funds, not advertising. The London olympics barely pulled $1 billion on advertising and $4 billion on broadcast revenue.

Cart not just before the horse

[Crashmarik]

Somewhere on the next continent.

It would be nice to know that mammals can successfully reproduce in 1/3 G with healthy offspring.
And other little things like that.

Most of the promoters of space colonization always seem to be either ignorant or deliberately overlooking all the problems there were in colonizing the new world and Africa, post renaissance, and the sheer number of failed colonies. That was just on this planet. It's pretty difficult to make the case Mars will be easier.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[TWX]

I assume that it'll be LOADS more difficult. Even the most optimistic well-thought science fiction work on the subject, Robinson's Mars Trilogy, opens with a description of the advance equipment sent at considerable expense to provide colonists with as basic things as water and air. And Robinson, for literary license, makes things far easier than they really will be to make the story fit within one lifespan.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[Opyros]

And, of course, he postulates a way of extending the human lifespan to multiple centuries.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[TWX]

Exactly. I don't think that humans will go to Mars to remain there until robotic missions have essentially built and distilled and mined and refined enough to make the human settlement functional to the point that it runs without the human presence stressing the systems. It's going to be like remotely building a combination aircraft carrier and submarine on another planet with a communications loop of 20 minutes.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[KeensMustard]

And of course if we had the capability to do that, why would we send human bodies at all?

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[Anonymous Coward]

This is dangerously close to blasphemy. Please report to your local Space Nutter Holy Site and be sure to bring a Star Trek boxed set, a picture of Mars and a five page report describing how you truly believe the species must colonize the universe.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[Anonymous Coward]

for the same reason you don't kill yourself and get replaced with a robot drone?

surely a cheap one is capable of performing all the "important" things you do

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[david_thornley]

I'm going to assume that humans are just going to be better than robots at some things, and we'll want to have humans in different places. Besides, once we've done that, a Mars colony can not only be self-sustaining, but growing, and therefore it will serve as a backup for the human race.

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[KeensMustard]

for the same reason you don't kill yourself and get replaced with a robot drone?

No.

surely a cheap one is capable of performing all the "important" things you do

Non sequitur (per above)

Re: Cart not just before the horse

[KeensMustard]

I'm going to assume that until someone clearly describes what those "things" are, that they are probably things better done by robots, given the otherwise clear and demonstrated advantage to robots.

Bruce said it:

[Anonymous Coward]

Shop smart. Shop SpaceMart.

Cooled?

[Enigma2175]

How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled

Why would you need spacesuit cooling on Mars? It's not space, where the side facing the sun heats up and it is difficult to radiate heat, there is an atmosphere that is quite chilly. I would think that you would need spacesuit heating on Mars, not cooling. However, I'm not a rocket scientist, is there anyone who has definitive knowledge on this topic?

Re:Cooled?

[Sowelu]

Saying that Mars has an atmosphere, while true, is maybe a bit too generous. I could easily believe that it can't cool sufficiently. Besides, wearing big bulky suits here on Earth, even in cold weather, can give you overheating issues, and these ones would have to be very big and very bulky indeed to last for very long.

Re:Cooled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, the atmosphere on Mars might as well be a vacuum. How much convective cooling do you think you'll get from 1% of our atmospheric pressure? How much heat transfer you think you'll get from that? It's not "chilly", it doesn't have enough mass to take away heat from you!

It's like asking the temperature of the vacuum in your Thermos flask. Which doesn't need a perfect vacuum to work either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

The ignorance about basic space physics is shocking, but I guess that's a side-effect of having so many Space Nutters here who'd rather discuss comic books and hypothetical scenarios involving an alternate periodic table of the elements and magical engineering.

Re:Cooled?

[mbone]

How does a space suit on Mars work? Show me how it is pressurized, and how it is cooled

Why would you need spacesuit cooling on Mars? It's not space, where the side facing the sun heats up and it is difficult to radiate heat, there is an atmosphere that is quite chilly. I would think that you would need spacesuit heating on Mars, not cooling. However, I'm not a rocket scientist, is there anyone who has definitive knowledge on this topic?

At 6 millibar pressure, you are very close to a vacuum spacesuit environment; the atmosphere is not going to cool or heat you significantly*. Of course, the Sun is less intense on Mars, but if you are working and generating heat, I am sure you will need cooling.

* This is how the surface temperature in the Sun can be 25 C, while 1 meter up it's -25 C. If you were standing there, the heat from the surface would be much more important than the cooling from the atmosphere.

Re:Cooled?

[Irate Engineer]

Atmospheric temperatures on Mars can range from 20 deg. C to -150 deg. C, depending on where you are standing and the time of day. Since the atmosphere is so thin the relative importance of convection and radiation heat transfer tilts toward radiation being a bigger player. Standing in the sun when the atmosphere is 20 deg C might be uncomfortably warm as you don't just feel the atmospheric temperature, but you also get a radiation component unrelated to the air temperature. If you have ever skied or hiked in the mountains in the winter, on some clear calm sunny days you may be very warm despite the air temperature being quite frigid. Upshot is that a suit would need a general thermal regulation capability (heating and cooling).

Re:Cooled?

[Graymalkin]

While the Martian surface temperatures are fairly low (~63ÂC) the atmosphere is also incredibly thin. At the surface the atmosphere is about 1/100th the density of the Earth's atmosphere. This means the ability for the atmosphere to convect heat away from a spacesuit is 1/100th that you would expect on Earth.

The occupant as well as the electronics and other powered elements of the suit all need a way to bleed of waste heat. A small heat sink on the back might work on the Earth but would need to be much larger to work as effectively in the thin Martian atmosphere. A spacesuit can't "breathe" like insulating clothes would on the Earth.

Such a cooling system likewise needs a method to be shut down or reversed in order to keep the suit's occupant from freezing to death if the outside temperature dropped significantly like in a shadowed valley or at night.

Re:Cooled?

[Jarik C-Bol]

Yep, sunburn on sub zero days is hilarious.

Re:Cooled?

[drinkypoo]

Upshot is that a suit would need a general thermal regulation capability (heating and cooling).

Making it reflective might well be enough to handle the cooling aspect. Probably would. Side bonus, being easier to see. Down side, requires frequent cleaning. As you dust up, you get hot. The future of all kinds of low-pressure suits is to use a constrictive layer instead of pressurizing. It should be a relatively simple problem to solve. Each suit will need to be custom fitted to an extent not necessary with pressurized suits, however, which are AFAIK already fairly customized.

Re:Cooled?

[angel'o'sphere]

You need to get rid of the body heat or you die by overheating yourself.
The Mars atmosphere is so thin, it counts as vacuum regarding a space suit. So yes, one side will get quite warm, not as 'hot' as in earth orbit or on the moon, though.
Because of the low pressure there is not much of an cooling effect by the atmosphere.

I've got this vision

[Rinikusu]

That they're going to build a giant version of the salmon cannon.

Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[Spy Handler]

I thought it was just a harmless enthusiast group promoting space travel and stuff.

If they're actually taking people's money as a fee (rather than a charitable donation) when they have no launcher no lander no habitat no nothing, they're selling snake oil.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[silfen]

If they're actually taking people's money as a fee (rather than a charitable donation) when they have no launcher no lander no habitat no nothing, they're selling snake oil.

They take $5-$75 (depending on how well-off your home country is), and they have tens of thousands of applications. You have to be a total moron to mistake that for anything other than a donation to the project. Phrasing it as an "application" makes it more personal and is a good marketing gimmick.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[gl4ss]

200 000 total morons then.
they should have just have asked for donations, would be ethically easier to defend.

and that really explains how why they were asking for applicants when they really were asking for donors, to get money. money from morons.

that really explains all the strangeness of the project: first they needed some cash and this provided them with some cash. not with enough cash to do anything related to the actual stated goal of course but plenty of money to pay for living expenses for couple of people for few years. as a project like that, there's nothing strange about it.

oh and had they any real plan then they could have found few rich donors to pay the same money. but since they don't have, this is the way they had to go - since rich bigtime donors tend to ask things like "how?".

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[Anonymous Coward]

200 000 total morons then

No, more like close to zero morons, because unlike you, these people understand that their chances of actually going to Mars are next to nil.

that really explains all the strangeness of the project

It only seems "strange" to you because you are apparently approaching it with the mindset of a six year old.

At this stage, Mars One is planning, publicity, and buzz. It's to get people thinking and talking. I'm sorry if those concepts are a little too complex for you.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[SourceFrog]

@"they should have just have asked for donations" They have been asking for donations since the start. I really don't see a big deal about charging a nominal processing fee for something that costs them money to process - it also ensures that only people who are really serious will apply, so you don't get flooded with millions of junk applications from Seymour Butts etc.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[KeensMustard]

In fact this summarises the whole enterprise: they needed some cash and this provided them with some cash. There is no reason for us to think they ever had any intent beyond taking the money.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[khallow]

At this stage, Mars One is planning, publicity, and buzz. It's to get people thinking and talking. I'm sorry if those concepts are a little too complex for you.

T\hat sort of strategy is deep in scam territory. There's no indication that Mars First will ever do anything except take peoples' money.

Re:Wait what, there's a registration fee?

[whodunit]

You raise a very good point. TFA is simply elucidating what everyone already knows: there's absolutely no chance that the Mars One project seriously intends to launch a payload, much less people - to anywhere, much less Mars. A manned Mars mission is a blatant impossibility for NASA as-is, given a host of technological, political and monetary barriers... but even their eggheads have churned out some rough sketches with a lot of whitespace labeled "work this out later." It's the preliminary brainstorming that proceeds the engineering: before engineers could build the LM, someone had to decide that lunar-orbit rezvendous was the way to go.

The fact that the Mars One project hasn't even done this much says everything. (TFA's commentor tells Slashdot nothing new, but does help inform the less technically-inclined.) In light of this, the Mars One projects Serious Statements have always sounded like a novel way to make people start thinking about space; to consider a Mars mission "seriously" instead as just another airy, easily-dismissed "someday we'll have flying cars" fantasy. The "suicide mission" aspect is both sensationalist and a way to force people to comtemplate the inherent human risks in space exploration. I personally have no problem with this and I wish them luck with their interesting promotion of space exploration. However, the parent post asks a very, very good question:

If they're not going to Mars with that money - or even producing preliminary brainstorms - what the heck ARE they doing with it?

Don't worry ...

[fahrbot-bot]

... I'm sure any problems Mars One finds will be fixed in the next release.

They should just make the horror movie now

[Cow007]

A team of explorers heads to the red planet on an uncertain journey, never to return. A dangerous journey and many surprises await. Coming this summer Mars Uno: No Return. (Oh wait they are making a reality show). Will it be on Fox with the first televised execution?

Re:They should just make the horror movie now

[ihtoit]

Capricorn One
at least one episode of The Outer Limits (I'm thinking the one with Michael Dorn as an astronaut who's been taken over by an alien entity or somesuch. Or was that Masters of Science Fiction? Twilight Zone? Shit, I can't even remember)
Red Planet
Escape From Mars
(my favourite) The Martian Chronicles, adapted from the book of the same name by Ray Bradbury

Sort of related, there was a movie on TV the other night, called Into Infinity, made in 1975 by Gerry Anderson. Concerned a family a la Lost In Space - yep, lots of science[TM], I mean actual science, not the typical Hollywood explanation "Why is the sky blue?" "BECAUSE SCIENCE!", but "Because the predominant gas, nitrogen, scatters blue light and absorbs red". I'd love to find it for download, 'cos it's actually pretty entertaining - and still pretty accurate.

true but...

[silfen]

I have no illusions about Mars One. But I think it's time to explicitly tell NASA to stop wasting money on manned space travel and stick to launching climate satellites and space telescopes and robotic interplanetary missions, something they have had some success at; even there, they need to become much more efficient.

Re:true but...

[farble1670]

even there, they need to become much more efficient.

more efficient ... than who? who else has autonomously landed a nuclear powered rover the size of a small car on the surface of mars? do you have some evidence to support that this should / could have been done for less (2.5B USD)?

i searched for "curiosity rover pork" and the first article that came up was from the tea party. there you go.

Re:true but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since they know better than the NASA, the tea party should definitely send lean, cheap unmanned mission to Mars. Or even better, manned ones (crewed with tea party members, that goes without saying).

We have top men working on it. Top. Men.

[jdgoulden]

"...do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying..." There is so much wrong with this sentence.

Re:We have top men working on it. Top. Men.

[ihtoit]

what, apart from the fact that the primary contractor for the Jupiter-Redstone missiles was Chrysler and for the Saturn, Boeing?

Frightfully few details, say it ain't so.

[Anonymous Coward]

No flying gas stations, no flying cars. Color everyone surprised.

Triumph of 21st century thought

[Gothmolly]

Think about it (if you can):
Wanting something is enough to make it happen.
Wisdom of crowds.
Scientists don't know everything.
You'll be famous.

Sounds like the recipe for external validation that every GenY and Millenial are craving.

Re:Triumph of 21st century thought

[argStyopa]

The only thing missing there is "Crowdfunding" eg Kickstarter.

First post from Mars!

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn speed of light....

But if there WAS a SpaceMart...

[potus98]

But if there WAS a SpaceMart, I'd totally shop there!

Re:But if there WAS a SpaceMart...

[Anonymous Coward]

But if there WAS a SpaceMart, I'd totally shop there!

Ironically, there's never a place to park.
"It's like shopping at Spacemart,,, and not finding a space" - Alanis Morrissette, The Omitted Verses

Re:But if there WAS a SpaceMart...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder, could you buy an illudium Q-36 explosive space modulator at SpaceMart? I've always wanted one of them.

Not invented here syndrome?

[swb]

to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life's work

Personally, I think it's great that there are people dumb/crazy/brave enough to try to accomplish this outside of whatever the ossified system is. I'm sure Linus was told by plenty of people "You can't develop a better operating system like this! We've been sitting in cubicles at Bell Labs for 20 years, slaving over punch cards and 9 track mag tapes toiling in anonymity and you think a bunch of Internet hackers are going to create a viable operating system that can do real work?"

Maybe this is what bothers all those people, that despite their trying and relative anonymity someone else NOT diligently working in anonymity and utilizing other skills or methods will succeed where they haven't, and this bugs them. Should there be a manned mission to Mars it should be THEIR mission because of their ceaseless faith and devotion to the true methods and ideals of space travel.

It almost reads like a religous argument from the 16th century -- why should a group of barely literate peasants be allowed to read and interpret the word of God and achieve salvation through their own heretical ideals and methods? It can only be achieved through the devotion to and leadership of the one true church and its singular vision as revealed through its chosen leaders.

Now, I don't know much about Mars One and it probably is a bullshit deal designed to fleece the naive and they can't get to Disney's "Mission to Mars" let alone fly a mission to Mars. So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.

Re:Not invented here syndrome?

[fyngyrz]

So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.

Spot on.

Re:Not invented here syndrome?

[Jiro]

First of all, many of the people who worked on Linux had degrees and/or professional experience in directly relevant areas.

Second, Linux was an unusual case because programming requires relatively little in the way of hardware compared to other pursuits--and certainly compared to going to Mars.

Third, computer programs don't need to be as tightly integrated as the output of rocket scientists does. Furthermore, because they are not as tightly integrated, the system can limp along with some missing features for a long time and not be totally halted in its tracks by that feature being missing.

Re:Not invented here syndrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

As with all things, the key there is moderation. First, building spacecraft is not like writing software. Hell, at this point, even writing software is not like writing software. So sure, the way NASA has done space exploration is not the only way to do it. But from basic physics, we know that certain things are necessary, and no amount of bravado will allow someone to sidestep that. You might as well apply this logic to building bridges. Who are these "experts" and "engineers" to tell me that I need to understand silly things like "math" and "physics" to build a bridge, and have thousands of workers labor in anonymity building that bridge?

Re:Not invented here syndrome?

[Kjella]

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.

vs

I'm creating a kick-ass OS that'll totally blow minix and gnu/hurd out of the water and I'm offering a lifetime license for only $5-75 for early adopers on Kickstarter

Mars One has as much substance as a MLM pyramid scheme, lots of hype and glossy marketing which not only siphons away funds that could have gone to serious projects but will likely backfire on everyone else when the bubble bursts. There's a difference between thinking outside the box and not really trying, particularly using other people's money.

Re:Not invented here syndrome?

[jklovanc]

Personally, I think it's great that there are people dumb/crazy/brave enough to try to accomplish this outside of whatever the ossified system is.

Sure "dumb/crazy/brave" can be a good thing at times but when you bamboozle hundreds of thousands of people into giving you money for something that is obviously not possible it becomes a scam.

I'm sure Linus was told by plenty of people "You can't develop a better operating system like this!

There's the rub. Linus improved on something that had already been done. Unix had already been created. So far no one has sent a person 54 million kilometers to a place with negligible atmosphere, no protection from cosmic rays and asked them to survive. The difference is many orders of magnitude.

So what? Whining that it's hard and and that someone wants to do it some other way than the "true way" sounds like MORE bullshit designed to protect the chosen ones than any real criticism.

Calling colonizing Mars "hard" is like calling faster than light travel "a bit difficult". I am not saying there is a true way. I, and the author, are saying that Mars 1 has done almost nothing to deal with the technology needed to get to or live on Mars. All they have is hand waving and faith. There are huge scientific and economic hurdles a Mars colony would have to get over that Mars 1 has not even acknowledged exists.

YOU are a scam

[fyngyrz]

You figure all of NASA, the european space agency, the Russians, the Chinese... the various private undertakings, every satellite manufacturer and service provider in the world... are all deluded, do you? You think the ISS is an illusion, and that there are no raw materials to be had outside of deep gravity wells? You think the ISS can't be bettered? You think we can't solve the remaining problems just because they're "hard"? You think we won't? I suppose you think the landing of a man on the surface of the moon in 1969 is a myth, then? You think the landing of the various (numerous) mars probes is a myth? You think Voyager isn't out there at the boundary of the solar system? You think we don't have spacecraft watching the sun from various angles? You think there aren't weapons platforms, weather satellites, radio and television satellites, flight/orbital test platforms, GPS constellations, cubesats, amateur radio sats... and yet there are engine tests going on with new propulsion methods, there are tests on new methods that aren't ready for engine design, there are space telescopes, gravity sensing platforms, It's actually getting kind of crowded near the earth, but that's no impediment to the various probes that have gone up, and continue to go up to destinations further out. Then there are the people trying for a beanstalk, working the materials science for all they're worth, trying to develop just the right material.

And you can't even connect all this with the idea that the odds hugely favor that we have lots and lots of time to develop whatever we need... and that we did almost all of the forgoing in just over 50 years...

You think a few years of low-ish progress spell the end? You think a scam (or overly optimistic collection of fruitbars) and the actions of a bunch of oath-violating fudgetards in congress defines and terminates the entire undertaking?

Frankly, I'm quite confident the "nutter" here... is you. You, and the drooling idiot with mod points who cranked your insanity up past zero.

Re:YOU are a scam

[PopeRatzo]

You figure all of NASA, the european space agency, the Russians, the Chinese... the various private undertakings, every satellite manufacturer and service provider in the world... are all deluded, do you?

No, just the private sector ones. Or more specifically, the private sector ones that aren't out-and-out scams.

Re:YOU are a scam

[Anonymous Coward]

"You figure all of NASA, the european space agency, the Russians, the Chinese... the various private undertakings, every satellite manufacturer and service provider in the world... are all deluded, do you?"

Um, no? I figure that anyone who looks at a satellite and thinks "gee, now we can colonize Mars!" is the deluded one.

http://www.distancetomars.com/

I have *no* idea how you get your conclusion from what I post.

"Frankly, I'm quite confident the "nutter" here... is you. You, and the drooling idiot with mod points who cranked your insanity up past zero."

That's nice, and I'm quite confident that you, me and everyone else will all stay right here. Forever.

You can have all the time you want, it won't change the four fundamental forces of the universe or the periodic table of the elements.

But by all means, here's the horse: keep flogging it.

In the meantime the human race will pass you by as you stay stuck in the romantic visions of philosophers past.

Re:YOU are a scam

[gl4ss]

your post in the context of mars one describes just exactly the kind of space nutter that was being described, so... great job at proving his point. Tying the profitable and for reason and realistic government space projects to the subject matter of Mars One just shows how much in the nut well you are. the project doesn't have infinite time, except in the sense that they don't except to give any results before blowing through the money(transferring into the pockets of the personnel, as no actual expenses apart from those are taking place).

those darn gravity wells... you should understand that the mars one project doesn't have any steps of it figured out. basically, you and I could get together, eat a few ice creams and come up with a plan that's further planned than the mars one plan. that's why the article author thinks the mars one project is strange, since it bears no hallmarks of any serious expedition. what the author found strange is that no actual technical engineering preparations of any kind seemed to have been taking place, so at this speed the timeframe would be infinity.

I mean, seriously, you would need to be a serious "yo3d printers yo 50 years yo we can do it it's easy!" nutter to bet on their side.

it's still better thought out than SOLAR FRIGGIN ROADWAYSSS.

it's really rather nice example of an almost scam to take money from people while having to deliver nothing. nothing to get them on the hook either for fraud or anything, unlike when selling overunity machines, water engines etc. solar friggin roadways is another example of a similar techno scam that has nothing to put the perpetrators on hook - never mind the project making zero sense at all - and the believers just hype it up as "it'll get profitable with scale" while it just gets stupider the bigger the scale is(vs. putting the solar panels on almost anything else than the road. anything being really _anything_ else you can think of from lamp posts to lawns to walls to busses to fences to sides of bridges to rooftops to roofs to be built over the roads).

I think the problem is that just because people play with computers and use iphones they start to think they understand things - and for some reason stop asking questions about feasibility and think that something wasn't done just because nobody thought of it before(when in fact it wasn't being done because someone had thought of it before) - maybe that's some jobsian fantasy, people totally ignoring where jobs got his ideas from and that those ideas would have been explored eventually anyways since it wasn't really not having the idea of a gui that was keeping a gui at bay when home computers had 4kb of ram.

so we get shitloads of people on youtube believing that magnets and coils have some kind of tesla superpower locked into them that can run cars for free.. and it was seemingly easy to get thousands and thousands of people into believing that the simple reason we haven't sent anyone on a one way ticket to mars was that we didn't have any volunteers(when in fact finding the volunteers is the rather easy part of the project and everything else is very complicated and cost.).

Re:YOU are a scam

[fyngyrz]

This is a direct quote from your post containing your conclusion:

It's over, finished, done. The Space Age is in the past. Brush your hand over its eyelids, make your sign of the cross and zip up the body bag and slam the morgue door closed. None of the Space Age dreams will happen.

Ever.

Your blanket position on the matter of all interplanetary space progress is ridiculous. Really hard and really expensive projects don't just happen like a trip to McDonalds. In this matter, as with many others (think semiconductors), multi-stage bootstrapping is required. You presented a completely unsupportable conclusion based on what is no more than a shift in focus caused by temporally local economic conditions. Underlying your out-there conclusion is the idea that technology won't provide more sophisticated and relatively less expensive solutions to the harder problems, which history shows is also the very most unlikely assumption you could possibly make.

Barring absolute catastrophe, we are certain to eventually (most likely within a century or so) make it to interplanetary space in force, and from there, onto other planets. If nothing else, the almost endless resources that will become available to us as a result will pull us there via the usual human triggers. Not so subtle potential results include major reductions in polluting industries on our planet, less destruction in the pursuit of minerals, massive non-polluting energy supplies, and even greater technological advances. And there will always be people interested in exploration for its own sake, not to mention scientists whose interests are documenting the past for the sake of understanding the present.

Whatever ...

[CaptainDork]

We have to get off this planet and, like every other early voyages to any place we've ever been, we have got to experience lots of failures.

If dude ranchers want to take the first lunge, it's their business.

Re:Whatever ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we have to get of this planet and inhabit one hostile to human living? Seems stupid to give up on the only place in the Universe that is capable of sustaining life naturally.

Re:Whatever ...

[farble1670]

that's fine, but it's not the point. selecting a crew before you have even plans for very nearly ever piece of significant hardware required for the mission is putting the cart about 55 million km before the horse.

Re:Whatever ...

[jklovanc]

Even early voyagers has some hope of returning. Mars1 is a one way trip.

Re:Whatever ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said give up? Just spreading out some. Like the first living cell is about to try to divide for the very first time. Sure it'll be rough at first...

Re:Whatever ...

[CaptainDork]

Not every early voyager.

Some couldn't return and expect to survive it.

Re:Whatever ...

[jklovanc]

Some couldn't return

Other than the Australian convicts most explorers planned on returning. Even the ones that did not want to come back expected to be able to if they had to.

Most colonists took what they thought they would need and expected to be able to survive off the things they found in the new land. Sometimes it did not work and the colony failed. In most cases if the colony survived a few years it never failed. Any Mars expedition would be reliant on the Earth for many decades if not centuries. A settlement on Mars is much better described as an outpost rather than a colony. It would not be self sufficient and would die if a couple of re-supply missions did not get through.

The other difference is that colonists expected to be able to trade for products from the old country. They sent back food, furs, gold, etc and added to the economy of the Old World. That is not going to happen as there is nothing on Mars that would justify the expense of getting it back to Earth. Rather than being an addition to the economy a Mars settlement would just be a money pit. Keep spending money to support people on Mars to do things that can be done for much lower costs by robots.

Another major difference is that the cost of failure is so much higher. In the age of sail it would have been at most a few ships, a few people and some supplies. That would have been the equivalent of maybe $50M. A failure on Mars would cost tens of billions of dollars. The scale is much different

Same with TFA

[s.petry]

Comparing the prospects of a private company sending people to mars with the claim that "...at best, an amazingly hubristic fantasy: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media, in money, to be able to somehow, magically, do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity pursuing their life’s work."

Every time NASA has tried to submit a proposal for an extended trip, whether back to the moon or to mars, they have been shut out of budget. Well, there was the one plan sent to Congress that was just a sick joke of inflated numbers, but after that there have been several very good proposals. No project has been funded, so how the hell can this person claim that Governments have tried to do this? Sorry, I don't count fighting for budget as doing any actual work, which quite frankly has been very well planned and could have been done if funding was approved.

The US seems to have been the only country with enough money to take on the challenge, and we can't do it because.. well, we'd rather spend trillions of dollars bombing brown skinned people and stirring up trouble in every other country in the world.

Eisenhower and Kennedy were correct, and we have been ignorant and complacent for far too long.

Re:Same with TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

In the while they at least did get to the moon a few times, made a reusable space vehicle (ok, it was not as good as it should have been, but has serviced decently for two decades), and together with other countries they succeeded in building an orbital space station with peronnel all year round and regular rocket trips(ayutomated ones) to it.

And also the various state owned agencies did send probes with various complexity levels around the solar system and beyond. Talking mars, NASA at least was able to send there some rovers.

For manned missions, space suits are being developed...slowly...

They are trying and having some success, withing the budget constraints. Much more success than the mars one publicity stunt with no substance behind it.

state space agencies may be slow by many standards but at least are achieving something.

Actually mars one is like a typical non-profit

[slew]

Typical non-profit entities have grandiose goals such as eliminating poverty or feed orphans or some other goal that tugs as the hearts (and purse strings) of a dedicated and forgiving audience. They usually have no idea what they are doing and are making it up along the way. Of course they try really hard and maybe they accomplish a few things along away, but of course they never really "solve" the problem. If they do they find something else.**

Meanwhile, the principal of the organization get to earn a living doing what they enjoy with other folks footing the bill.

Take it for what it is people. People gotta earn a living somehow...

**for instance, the March of Dimes was started to stamp out Polio. After the vaccine was developed (none of their funding contributed to the Salk Vaccine, it was spent on palliative care), they had to find something else to do, they simply didn't wind down, which is why you have to start with a really really grandiose goal to make sure it doesn't happen to quickly

Agile

[Charliemopps]

People accustom to Waterfall look at an Agile project and scream: "It's not possible! How could you even attempt to move forward without the specs carved in granite and hauled to the top of a mountain by a neck-beard in robes?!?!" The Agile folks roll their eyes and tell grandpa to get back to not getting anything done.

That said, this is probably still going nowhere. But at least they're trying eh?

Re:Agile

[abies]

But at least they're trying eh?

Are they? What of the thousand obstacles which are in the way of this flight they have actually _solved_? Can you point to any tangible technical advancement or solution which came out of this group? Not as a fancy animation with no details, but as a real item.
Imagine kid who wants to send his garden rocket into space. He gather materials, research, fire off 10 prototypes, but best of them raised only to 1000 meters. He gives up. Yes - you can say 'at least he has tried'.
Now compare it with other kid, who has done a cryon drawing of rocket in space and goes around asking his parents, friends and strangers to fund his rocket - and he spends that money to buy more crayons. Producing even 1000 cryon drawings of his rocket does not count as 'he has tried'. Producing a full autocad diagram of it and failing to put it together because of lack of manual skill - maybe, but not cryon drawings. And this is all this group is doing, they just do marketing and nice looking 3d animations without any backing in reality.

Maybe down a few

[PopeRatzo]

Given the private sector's safety record with manned space flight, I wonder how many of those 200,000 volunteers have backed out in the past week or so.

Hadfield's got a point

[ihtoit]

we're not talking about commodity gear here, this is frontier tech as it has been the entire run of the space program so far. They still haven't got EVA gloves right yet (too bulky, means that equipment designed for orbital maintenance has to be given the Duplo treatment - handles twice as large as they would otherwise need to be, etc.), manned capsules are still touch and go, with a what, 1 in 50 chance of a catastrophic failure at any point in the mission? Still not bad odds considering we're talking about the most complex machines ever conceived of by human minds (the shuttle orbiters have over 2.5 million parts and 230 miles of wire - each. Any one of which can fail with potentially fatal consequences). Step one of having a viable programme is reducing the odds of failure while maintaining or improving the safety record. Reducing the odds of failure involves reducing the number of parts which can fail, ie simplifying the design - considering the SOV programme was pretty much experimental by its very nature, I think the kinks are fairly well known by now.

good article

[globaljustin]

we could/should be on Mars **now** but as a NASA/ESA/JAXA combined science/colonization/mining mission....not some reality show!

TFA is a good article...it's one of the few times I'd read TFA *before* it was on /.

the author does a good job of telling the truth (MarsONE is a SCAM) while respecting the dreams/dignitiy of the unfortunate souls who have dropped everything to sign up

what MarsOne tells me is that **people are ready for this**...it's time to go...but there's only one way to do this: FULL ON...no half-assed reality shows...let the pros do it!

I'm set, at least for the moon...

[jtara]

I've got my Pan Am Moon First Flight Club membership card!

It's not a 'free market v government' thing.

[Caspian]

I'm as far from a 'free market religionist' as one can get. I'm a ridiculously left-wing hippie-dippie liberal. To me, this isn't about some sort of mad faith in Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. It's simply a reaction to the fact that our government would rather allocate huge sums of money to things OTHER THAN manned space exploration.

For instance, the military. And the contractors that support the military.

NASA's budget has, quite simply, been far too small to support an envelope-pushing manned space flight program for quite some time. Witness how the Shuttle (1970s tech!) was used into the 2010s. NASA's manned spaceflight program stalled some time in the 80s and never really recovered. (It may have been the Challenger tragedy that made funding NASA significantly harder; I don't know. I'm not a politician, nor an economist.)

Quite simply, the government ISN'T doing it. And it probably won't, for the forseeable future. Who does that leave, with the kind of money to go to space? Corporations.

It's simple logic. Has nothing to do with 'the corporations are better than the government' or any sort of rhetoric at all. It's just "[X] isn't doing it, so [Y] is gonna try, because it's something some people want."

Re:It's not a 'free market v government' thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Quite simply, the government ISN'T doing it."

Actually it is. NASA does have a plan for a manned Mars mission, more detailed than Mars One, and NASA has the expertise. http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/41431/1/09-3642.pdf (found via wiki).
Mars One only has a not so detailed plan.

Re:It's not a 'free market v government' thing.

[SourceFrog]

If anyone says Mars colonization is 'unaffordable' remind them that the cost of the Iraq war alone would have covered NASA's budget for another 200 years, or funded at least 100 manned Mars missions.

That's not to mention all the other wars, and not even getting started on other wasteful programs like the War on Drugs. Space travel is actually damn cheap compared to all the other crap we waste massive amounts of money on.

Re:It's not a 'free market v government' thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's no profit in establishing a colony on Mars...corporations aren't known for making incredibly expensive mega-projects that have no hope of earning money.

Re:It's not a 'free market v government' thing.

[Anonanonaon]

You said it!

It's almost as if the psychopaths who lead the human race are retarded assholes more interested in profiting from dumb violence which drags the creative principle down into the mud (and rapes it) rather than from doing things that are hard and exploratory and which propel human awareness and knowledge upwards.

Because, really, when we consider it, you can transfer just as much wealth from the public pocket to the private pocket by investing in space. It could STILL be a huge tax-skimming scam. And yet, it's just not good enough for the psychopath.

So it's got less to do with money, and more to do with an innate desire to defile the Creation.

I guess you can't defile as much when you're flying up to meet the universe in person than you can by being down in the mud murdering its children.

JFK pushed the space program forward. He wasn't killed for this reason, or any other single thing. Those animals killed him simply because he was Good.

Yes and no

[Kevin Fishburne]

Being deliberate and careful is most always the right way to pursue any complex or risky endeavor, however there are times when saying, "Fuck it. Let's do this," actually works. Christopher Columbus comes to mind. Of course the trip to and existence on Mars is a hell of a lot tougher than what Columbus pulled off. I can't see any way for a permanent outpost on Mars to be accomplished without sending an absolute shitload of automation there first. You'd need a fully-functional living environment with at least two levels of redundancy for critical systems, all remotely tested once in place, before the first human even begins the journey. Otherwise you are Columbus, but this time chances are your faith will end up killing you.

Re:Yes and no

[ChromaticDragon]

The analogy to Columbus is rather interesting.

Columbus was essentially a dead man walking. Most learned folk knew rather well that his calculations were messed up. Essentially he was significantly off regarding his calculations of the circumference of the globe. People knew this. This is why he had such difficulties getting funded. It wasn't that he was trying to convince people the world was round - he was trying to convince people the world was small enough to sail to India.

And he would absolutely, certainly have died in the open sea had he not lucked out in an incredible way.

Maybe, just maybe, Mars One people will stumble across a fully viable, relatively hospitable, alien population which will save them and propel us into a VERY "New World".

Re:Yes and no

[Kevin Fishburne]

Maybe, just maybe, Mars One people will stumble across a fully viable, relatively hospitable, alien population which will save them and propel us into a VERY "New World".

I heard some other Italian guy mention something about seeing canals up there, so who knows! I'll anxiously be awaiting the Mars One crew's report on the matter.

M.O.O.N. that spells Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe a stupid question, but why aren't we trying to practice on the moon, first?

Re:M.O.O.N. that spells Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

We did. It was extremely hard, very expensive, and utterly useless. Geeks have been crying over their space posters since then.

Re:M.O.O.N. that spells Mars

[able1234au]

That should be the first step. Learn how to mine the moon, export water to space, split the water to make fuel, oxygen etc. Mine moon materials and be self sufficient within easy communications range of earth. The skills learned there will be useful in eventually going to Mars. The distance for resupply is more realistic. The fuel created can be used for other missions. It is the next logical step from the ISS.

It'd make a hell of a reality show

[slashdot_commentator]

See how many days it takes for a colonist to die on Mars. Will it be from lack of oxygen? Run out of supplies before he/she can get a successful harvest? Blow their brains out? Add a deathpool component to it, and that will fund the mission right there.

Re:It'd make a hell of a reality show

[cbhacking]

Not sure if you're joking or not... that's literally the plan of the Mars One people (the reality show, not necessarily the death pool). That's how they plan to fund the colony.

Wrong questions.

[Anonymous Coward]

The questions that must be made are not about travel technology, there are already bots over there. Questions like how to produce oxygene, water, food in that planet are far more critical, we don't need to invest resources in up there just because Mars is a famous planet on the screens. Analogous, nobody is thinking in visiting Sun surface just because could be fun.

Others Call It Ponzi Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a scheme to steal money from the less intelligent among us for the enrichment of the schemers.

 

Really?

[Brett Buck]

Of course there are frightfully few details, they have no idea how to go about this, and probably have no real plan. I would question whether they EVER plan to do the mission, but even leaving the obvious scam potential out of it, even a temporary mission would require technology and organization at the very limits of current possibility.

      No one is going to mars in the Mars One project, now, or ever.

Volunteers

[Anonymous Coward]

My assessment of the Mars One Project volunteers is that they didn't really sign up for anything. It's an aspiration, something years (or decades) away, and they can back out any time they want. In fact I'll bet most of those volunteers don't even want to go. They want someone to go, sure, but not them personally.

I mean, 200,000 signups, really? Can anyone imagine this project needing 200,000? You know, in less than a century? They need 20, tops, and that would fill out their crew manifest for a decade. You know, once they get a spaceship from SpaceX or whomever.

Just wait and see

[timkofu]

"... do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying ..." SpaceX have already done this with the Falcon rockets. But the plan here probably is to start the idea and put it out there, then the people who will actualize it (technically and financially) will join it when they see the potential, and when they see they are not alone. They will make sure the hard questions are asked and satisfactorily answered. I'm bullish on the general idea.

The Truman Show

[Snospar]

I thought Mars One was linked to some sort of reality TV show where the entire mission would be filmed and broadcast like "Big Brother" in space.

I also assumed that they could make such a show without ever leaving Earth - but the gormless participants wouldn't need to know that (until much later). Once you've gone through the X-Factor style selection process to see who is most (un)suitable for a trip to Mars you then send them off to a training facility and from there you start to control the contestants access to outside media.

By the time "the launch window" comes around you could easily have them (and hell, us as well, the viewing public) convinced that they are onboard a genuine Mars mission rocket heading into space... much easier to achieve - and cheaper and safer - if it's all in a studio.

Re:The Truman Show

[Ford Prefect]

By the time "the launch window" comes around you could easily have them (and hell, us as well, the viewing public) convinced that they are onboard a genuine Mars mission rocket heading into space... much easier to achieve - and cheaper and safer - if it's all in a studio.

Been done already (albeit with a flight to a peculiarly non-weightless 'low Earth orbit' rather than a mission to Mars) with the 2005 television series Space Cadets.

Re:The Truman Show

[Snospar]

Thanks, that one must have flown straight passed me - I'd never heard of it. Perhaps MythTV is just a bit too effective at cutting out those annoying adverts!

SpaceMart

[Anonymous Coward]

This store is what I must do with my life.

Proposed codename of this mission

[StripedCow]

/dev/null

Depressingly impossible

[Spugglefink]

I spent a lot of time pondering this very thing recently. After considering all the problems that have to be solved for a one-way mission to Mars or anywhere else, I have to conclude we're probably going to go extinct on this rock one day, unless we develop radically magic technology.

I'm from the government and here to help.

[Kneissl]

"do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying"
They just need MORE money *Snicker*

Shop here, shop now

[Anonymous Coward]

Spacemart is to space, what Walmart is to walls?

Considering it will never happen, then what?

[gelfling]

Oh let's be serious. Man is NEVER going to Mars. Not Ever. Not in 50 years not in 500 years. This is the only planet we'll ever be on. Period.

Re:Considering it will never happen, then what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh oh, your Space Nutter brainwashing has worn off, report to your nearest Space Reeducation Camp.

Re:Considering it will never happen, then what?

[Anonymous Coward]

'Never' is a very long time. We've already put man on the moon and have demonstrated the capability to put objects on Mars. If we really wanted to, we could put the corpse of a man on Mars within one year.

they haven't been trying

[atari2600a]

Not for mars & definitely not since the soviets started not being dicks. Have you LOOKED at NASA's leadership, funding, projects? PROJECTS? Once the ISS deorbits SpaceX'll be the only reputable thing we have, unfortunately. I'd like to remind you that the Space Shuttle Program was supposed to be shuttling TENS OF PEOPLE to HUNDREDS POPULUS SPACE STATIONS WE"RE SUPPOSED TO HAVE BY NOW.

One whooosh for you

[fyngyrz]

My post wasn't in the context of mars one. My post was in the context of GP's despicable use of "space nutters."

The thing about slashdot is that you cannot assume posts are directly following or referencing the story. Sometimes they do, but they're quite likely not to. Often they follow unrelated or simply crazy remarks in previous posts, as here. In this case, we have a luddite chicken-little type naysaying any possibility of humans getting successfully into interplanetary space and onto other planets, and putting down anyone who thinks it can be done. His position is both ludicrous and wrong, and that's the context I responded to. He wasn't saying just the mars one effort was flawed; he was saying all efforts to put humans into space and onto other planets are flawed.

The thing is, even with scams such as selling real estate on the moon, and wildly unlikely undertakings that start with enthusiasm instead of hardware, there's a huge hard core of technology, expertise and historical context that demonstrates that interplanetary space is absolutely attainable and offers huge benefits. Those are the facts. GP is not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

Go back and read his post. Look specifically for his context: "space nutters" When you grasp that, then you'll have the information required to understand why I replied as I did.

It may, or may not, be a scam but

[Anonymous Coward]

ÃWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.Ã

That was old steaming pile of hubris as well, and they did it.

The citizen of today lacks the courage to try what is hard, but why does he wish to stop others from trying it using their own money?
What can he possible loose from the success of others at something he is so unwilling to try?
What can he possibly loose from their failure?

Wishful thinking

[Askmum]

How recent before man walked on the moon did people say that man would never walk on the moon? The fact that not all (or most of the) questions have not been answered does not mean it is impossible. Especially an astronaut should see that. It is clear that if Chris Hadfield were born 50 years earlier, he would not have been part of NASA because he couldn't begin to comprehend why it would have been possible. So yes: wishful thinking: if you think you can't, you probably won't. If you think you can, you'll build to make it happen. That's how you move forward, not by saying you can't.

At the risk of sounding pretentious,

[Anonymous Coward]

There is absolutely no way you are going to get the $100 billion required for a Mars mission by producing a freaking reality show.

You'd get it by telling the public that Mars is overrun by Islamists.

The Loved One?

[tmjva]

I don't know, but is there anything in the project that stipulates they have to get them there alive? This could be a adjunct the the old movie "The Loved One" for all we know. Mars is prime real estate for burial plots.

Ignoring it is easier than asking hard questions.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're already on the list of volunteers, how much did it cost you? What's that, zero? Why do I need to "protect that investment" by "asking the hard questions"?

Sure, there's a huge likelihood this project will fail and never get me to Mars. But the approach of "sit on my ass and ignore it, and if they offer me a seat on a rocket 20 years from now, treat it as a pleasant surprise and ask the hard questions then" seems like a perfectly reasonably time-management decision.

Asking those questions NOW just wastes time and energy confirming that this is a huge longshot, which I already knew if I have a drop of common sense! (And if I'm highly gullible, asking hard questions is not that likely to fix my inherent gullibility, is it now?)

Not what we think

[Anonymous Coward]

If we look at the possible fact that there are already alien beings on Mars and the fact that the surface of Mars is not as we think or made to believe it is, for all we know Mars already has a livable compound. The more they don't want us to know about it the more it's most likely something so extreme that society wouldn't be able to handle it.
Or...
The mission they describe isn't the mission at all...