The case against Mars colonisation

[Judi Lynn]

Plans are being made to colonise Mars. Zahaan Bharmal unpicks the arguments against the idea

Zahaan Bharmal
Tue 28 Aug 2018 03.00 EDT

Earlier this month, a group of 60 prominent scientists and engineers met behind closed doors at the University of Boulder Colorado. Their agenda: Mars colonisation.

Organised by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and attended by members of Nasa’s Mars exploration programme, the goal of this inaugural “Mars workshop” was to begin formulating concrete plans for landing, building and sustaining a human colony on Mars within the next 40 to 100 years.

This workshop signals the growing momentum and reality behind plans to actually send humans to Mars. But while SpaceX and partners ask whether we could live there, others still ask whether we should.

A Pew Research Centre survey carried out in June asked US adults to rank the relative importance of nine of Nasa’s current primary missions. Sending humans to Mars was ranked eighth (ahead only of returning to the Moon) with only 18% of those surveyed believing it should be a high priority.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/aug/28/the-case-against-mars-colonisation

[Duppers]

1. "Let's fix the Earth first."

"Let's fix the Earth first
The most polarising issue in the Mars debate is arguably the tension between those dreaming of a second home and those prioritising the one we have now."



This NASA spouse thinks fixing our planet should be our #1 priority. But I know we're not doing the job.

[lapfog_1]

2. I'm a former NASA Scientist

Worked with the DAO (Data Acquisition Office) which was part of the MTPE (Mission To Planet Earth). I also sat on Al Gore's review board of the EOSDIS (Earth Observation System Distributed Information Systems). NASA spent just a whole lot of taxpayer money in the 1990s and in the 2000s flying a lot of satellites to gather information about the climate of the planet using remote sensing technology.

While NASA might be one of the premier scientific organizations on the planet, I can tell you right now that it is not equipped or funded to "fix the earth"... and before we (mankind) try to fix it, we better know what we are doing so that we don't make the situation worse with unintended consequences.

Gather the data. Check.
Analysis to tell everyone that we killed the climate with our fossil fuelishness. Check.
Fix the planet. Uhhhh... not so fast.

Fundamentally NASA is still the space agency... you want to do more in space... NASA is the place to go to ask how.

Not sure I would ask NASA to fix the planet.

Not that I have anyone else in mind... after working with a bunch of climatologists for a decade... I don't think anyone has any ideas other than Stop Burning Stuff and plant some trees and then cut them down and bury them deep underground, and repeat. Probably won't help (for various reasons). But there you go. I'm sure there are other solutions that people are thinking of out there... I'm just not convinced that we know enough to implement such and, if we did, would it work?

[Duppers]

3. Yikes! I owe you a long-overdue PM!!

I'll explain in the PM later.

"...not equipped or funded to "fix the earth"'
Amen!! But you do have some very good ideas!! And an impressive resume.

However, the bottom line/first step, as you well know, is stopping human consumption and damage to the planet and that is not about to happen. Heck, even many DUers in a thread the other day about decreasing population (the political suicide of even mentioning population control) got up in arms about the suggestion and even questioned the logic of it! There's a severe deficit of knowledge about GCC here on DU and much more so in the general population.

Some scientists are knowledgeable about the possibile ways to ameliorate the coming doom but the public chooses to stay willfully ignorant. Therefore we don't have the political will to implement most possible solutions. Doesn't Jim Hansen and others think that ship has sailed anyway?

Wait until half of the North American continent is burning like the recent wildfires in California and people will be demanding that the government do something....if they're not killing all the gays who have made gawd cause our destruction! Only halfway kidding.

One of the saddest parts about our suicide is that we'll also be killing most animals on the planet. Humans' arrogance, ignorance, and religion (redundant) equals destruction.

[Wounded Bear]

4. OK, NASA can't "fix the Earth" maybe, but...

NASA is on the forefront of data collection to tell us what many of the major problems are and where they are the strongest.

NASA will be crucial in any movement to "fix the Earth."

[lapfog_1]

5. absolutely, both in the collection of more data

and the simulation (along with NCAR / UCAR and other agencies) of what happens which each potential geo-engineered solution (either one that "shades" the earth or removes CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere).

But we need a worldwide commitment from all of the nations on the earth (led by the industrial nations) to come up with a plan and execute it. Whatever is dreamed up and decided upon should be gamed out by the best and brightest people and the most powerful supercomputers on the planet... this time we simply must know what will happen before we do something. We have been treating our planet like it is a test tube... and we simply can't do that anymore.

Yes, NASA and the other world space agencies need to design and fly more remote sensing platforms... and play a role with geo-engineering the solution (especially if it is space based).

We can't just stop using fossil fuels... it's too far gone for that. (Of course we need to stop using fossil fuels, I'm saying I don't think that will be enough while we still try to support a planet that 7 billion of us depend on, much less things like the Great Barrier Reef which is actually dying before our eyes right now.

But we also can't jump into some plan or other that hasn't been completely thought out.

[Wounded Bear]

6. Don't leave out NOAA...

essentially all the agencies that Trump and his cronies want to abolish/curtail.

[lapfog_1]

7. yes... NOAA is important too.

And NASA's mission to study climate has been severely curtailed by this maladministration.

[hunter]

8. I oppose spending any public money to send humans beyond low earth orbit.

If people want to die or suffer significant injury in space, or find volunteer surrogates willing to take those risks, then they can damn well spend their own money.

Humans will never have a significant presence in space. Time is deep. The universe is big, the speed of light is absolute, and mankind is very, very small. That will never change. It's a problem of scale. Our civilization is less than a grain of sand on an immense beach.

This earth has seen many innovative species come and go. We're not the first, we won't be the last. A million years from now we're nothing but a peculiar layer of trash in the geologic record. Maybe somebody will remember us, but probably not.

To create a greater human presence in space we need to fund further research in artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear powered space propulsion systems.

It's possible our intellectual offspring might find a home in space; creatures with engineered bodies who can walk around naked on the surface of mars, creatures who don't need space suits to make repairs outside their space ships. Creatures who don't need air, creatures able to survive a wide range of temperatures...

I don't need natural biological humans living on mars to tell me what it's like there, nor do I find any "humanity's eggs all in one basket" arguments compelling.

If we screw up here on earth and bring about our own extinction, we're even less likely to survive in space.

[qazplm135]

9. couple of responses

1. Humans are really hard to make extinct. We are certainly doing our damnedest to kill millions, possibly billions via global warming, but extinction? Really hard for an omnivore species that can live in just about every nook and cranny of the planet barring permanently underwater. Point being, your last sentence isn't a likely outcome.

2. Eggs in one basket is absolutely a real thing. Comet, large asteroid, both are real possibilities and we need to both figure out where the threats are and how to stop them, but we also need to be moving towards not being a one-planet species. The latter is going to take centuries of progress. It's not something we can rev up once we've "fixed the planet." And right now, we are the only species capable of even considering it. The next one to come along is going to be quite a few million years away or hundreds of millions of years away.

3. The money spent on this is a drop in the bucket. That money is not going to make one bit of difference in "fixing the planet" one way or the other.

No one is suggesting we stop what we are doing and put all our efforts into terraforming Mars. But the reasoning you use and the article uses are not compelling to me at all for the very very limited money and effort we have and can continue putting into it to slowly move the ball forward to that end.

[hunter]

11. 2. When's the last time a large extinction level event asteroid hit the earth?

The dinosaurs had been around a long, long time when that happened, and even then the more birdlike among them survived and prospered.

As did our own pathetically colorblind nocturnal mammal ancestors.

Evolution works both ways. Humans might evolve into something stupid and brutish and worshiping false gods with orange spray tans.

I hope not.

In my Utopian vision our non-human intellectual offspring care enough about us, and respect us enough, that they take us along as passengers on the journey.

Like a dog riding in a car.

[qazplm135]

13. been awhile

but the reality is it could happen a few months, years, decades, or centuries from now...or ten million years from now. We don't know.

But in a traditional risk matrix, it's a very low risk of occurrence, but a very high result if it does...and that almost never results in a risk assessment of why worry about it.

Again, isn't just about humans, all life on Earth is at risk as long as this is the only life raft we own in the galactic sea.

[FiveGoodMen]

14. So, I've got to ask: What's your personal interest in the distant survival of human DNA?

YOU won't be going anywhere.

I won't be going anywhere.

No one we know will be leaving for another planet, and if a comet strikes, we'll all be right here dying.

But if we devote all of our time, energy, and resources, then MAYBE we can find a place where humans that we will never hear about can continue the propagation of our DNA.

What do any of us get out of that?

[qazplm135]

16. Again

Not just human life, all terrestrial life.

But yeah I am part of Team Human, so are they.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. We are indeed hard to make extinct now, but the move into space should come after

we "fix the planet". It would take a long time before humans in space could be independent of Earth, with the infrastructure to produce and run such a thing. In the mean time, they'd be dependent on a hi-tech Earth, and an Earth trashed by climate change or other environmental problems can't support such a thing. So even if your main long-term goal is "humans in space", then a thriving economic Earth is necessary to start that.

We only know of one asteroid strike in hundreds of millions of years that has caused mass extinction, and as hunter points out above, many genera survived it. Waiting a century to fix the Earth as a base before striking into space is a minute pause compared to the time over which mass extinction is likely.

[qazplm135]

18. The Earth

Being "fixed" will probably take just as long and waiting just extends the time we are vulnerable and the cost of fixing the Earth is so massive that it dwarfs money spent on eventually going to Mars.

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. There's "going to Mars", and there's "establishing humanity as independent in space"

The former has nothing to do with surviving an extinction-level event; it's just science (and the argument for that is about contaminating Mars before we're certain it has no indigenous life). Getting a self-sustaining human population in space will be more expensive than fixing Earth, and will take longer.

[qazplm135]

20. first

the two are necessarily tied together...you ain't going to Mars until you start figuring out how to get us there, how to survive in non-terrestrial conditions, how to grow food in low gravity/radiation, etc.

And no, those things are not going to be remotely more expensive than it will take to "fix the Earth."

Second, what does that even mean? Climate change? Tens of trillions. No more hunger? Tens of trillions. No more war? Probably inconceivable barring a fundamental shift in human nature/biology but certainly we are talking centuries if not millennia.

The cost of figuring out Mars is nowhere near that amount.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. This is the point; you're describing a station on Mars, not what it takes to survive the destruction

of civilisation on Earth and the impossibility of survivors rebuilding it. That means being able to manufacture hi-tech rockets, electronics, power plants etc. in space or on another planet. If you are saying we need a presence in space that would be more resilient than, say, a polar or remote island station on Earth, then we need to be able to do everything in space that we will be able to do on earth.


The arguments about "we must do this in case an asteroid hits us" are only about "... and wipes out all humans on earth"; there probably hasn't been a catastrophe that bad in the whole of earth history. The chances of climate change setting back civilisation by centuries are significant. Just from a space point of view, that needs fixing before having a duplicate hi-tech capability elsewhere in the solar system.

[qazplm135]

22. That's the end goal

And it's going to take a long time to get there. The longer you wait to start the longer it takes.

[muriel_volestrangler]

23. And we have millions of years. But climate change could delay the start by centuries

if it trashes the world economy. Fix the current problems, rather than looking forward to future work that will anyway depend on the current problems being fixed or going away somehow.

[qazplm135]

24. millions of years? No.

We don't know how long we have. Could happen tomorrow, or a billion years from now, or anytime in between.

But I get it, you like to walk first, then chew gum. I tend to believe you can do both at the same time.

[qazplm135]

10. So the three arguments:

1. contamination. There is no chance of life of anything more than possibly dormant microbes on Mars anytime in the near future. If ever. Maybe there might be a short period of time when the Sun starts to really heat up and go Red Giant that Mars slides back into the Goldilocks zone but even then, with little atmosphere and no protection from radiation, not sure even then. The only meaningful life on the planet will come from outside the planet (us, another species from Earth, or another planet outside the solar system).

2. Robots are better...to start...but ultimately life is what matters, and getting us (and other terrestrial species) out of the sole egg basket is what the end-game should be.

3. Fixing the Earth first? We can do more than one thing at a time, and the money on our space program and colonization is a drop in the bucket to what it would cost to "fix the Earth." When we've gotten rid of all our militaries and used that money to fix the Earth, I'll be more impressed.

[sl8]

12. Pew Survey

From http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/06/06/majority-of-americans-believe-it-is-essential-that-the-u-s-remain-a-global-leader-in-space/





Survey details:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/06/06/space-appendix-detailed-tables/

[Judi Lynn]

15. First things first people. Good for them. Thank you, sl8. n/t