Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.

A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

  • magnetosphere@kbin.social
    172·
    1 year ago

    Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.

    The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.

    • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.

      Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.

      • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
        41·
        1 year ago

        You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?

        Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.

        The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:

        No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term

        I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.

        For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

        Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.

        • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.eeEnglish
          11·
          1 year ago

          Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.

          • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
            3·
            1 year ago

            We can’t breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We’d need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.

            But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn’t just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.

              • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
                1·
                1 year ago

                MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
                To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future “Big MOXIE” would need to make.

                In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we’d need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That’s not trivial.

                Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          Jesus Christ you people really have no idea how space works, do you?

          The guy can’t just send up his own spacecraft anymore than Lockheed Martin and Raytheon can declare war on Russia.

          SpaceX sells spacecraft to NASA for them to use in the same way LM sells F-18’s to the Navy for them to use. At no point in time does Elon just get to unilaterally send civilians to Mars even if Starship was fully capable.

          Everything SpaceX craft do in space is under the charter and dictation of NASA, and at the current point in time, exclusively for government/military missions. Not his own flights of fancy.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      1 year ago

      Which is why you don’t hear NASA going “yep we’re good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!” Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.

      Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can’t remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.

      Space colonization is the future, it doesn’t matter if it’s ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.

      • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
        5·
        1 year ago

        The point of books like this is to underline areas where we’re still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn’t just complaining. It’s taking stock of what we still need to learn.

        • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Unfortunately on lemmy its only purpose is so people can circle jerk about how dumb Musk is for wanting that to be the end goal of SpaceX hardware.

      • magnetosphere@kbin.social
        51·
        1 year ago

        Did we even read the same article?

        A City on Mars ends with a kind of call to action. The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems. Let’s get the biology and engineering right before we send people to Mars.

        The authors aren’t against colonization. They’re against hasty, uninformed, reckless attempts.