One of my pet peeves with Mars enthusiasts is that they ignore the reality that living on Mars is going to truly, truly suck. You will never be outdoors again. You will have the constant whirr of machinery. You will have to plan outings down to the last bottle of O2. You will eat shit food. And you will gaze upon a dim Sun through a dusty porthole.
The idea of Mars is spectacular and wondrous and ecstatic and beautiful. Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.
A small minority - but still plenty of people - would thrive as pioneers on a new planet. We should let them go first, while you and me sit here and watch.
This is how the pioneers in the US (crossing east to west) worked right? They took huge risks and endured great hardship travelling hundreds of miles in carts for the possibility of land, independence etc.
There might have been fewer pioneers if it was a one way trip with rest of your short life spent locked up in the wagon car, and no prospects for personal (or family) material gains.
but the time it would take to build robots that could react to pretty much any situation (we're nowhere near that on AI research) is a loooot bigger than sending people there.
That is perhaps true, but only until people figure out how to terraform the planet. Americas also sucked (albeit to a lesser degree) for the first settlers, but some 500+ years later we have an economic and technological powerhouse here. Perhaps stark and cruel reality of Mars exploration can provide a similar growth engine for humanity and get the civilization to the next level in the next couple hundred years.
The Americas were as far as I know considered bountiful paradise by first settlers. It may not have had the infrastructure built as in Europe, but it was (and in many places still is) gorgeous. And within a few decades you could build small settlements as nice as loads of settlements were back home.
Mars in contrast looks like shit on first sight and I doubt we'll see terraforming equipment on any large scale for a very, very long time.
Anyway I don't necessarily disagree with your point I just don't think the comparison to settlers refutes the idea you were replying to that Mars is very ugly and harsh in every single way (except for the mental notion of doing something unprecedented) for first settlers and likely will be for the entirety of their lives. Quite different from the Americas I think.
Agreed, Mars is stark compared to the Caribbean, but there is some minimalistic beauty to it all.
There may also be some survivorship bias when it comes to the colonies. First colonies often failed and for quite a while (e.g. Roanoke nearly 100 years after Columbus), so I doubt it was all fun and paradise.
Guys, we can assume that its shit, but until we actually go there we won't know for sure if there aren't parts of it that are simply gorgeous and amazing too. So far, we've only just scratched the surface of understanding Mars.
There are many places un-explored on Mars that will indeed provide a beauty unlike anything on Earth. This is an assumed fact, but it is mathematically just as likely to be true as the decision made that Mars sucks, based on current data.
We get there. We explore every bit of it. We find parts of it we can actually live on, quite comfortably - albeit, yes, still in a tank. But there could be parts of Mars we can transform, within a 100 years or so - just like the early settlers of every continent on Earth, ever in the history of mankind - and turn into a habitable place to live.
All it takes is one Martian generation, or two, and maybe there will be Martian-humans who have the conversation "I could never live on Earth, far too strange and unknown .."
Go to a rocky desert, there are huge ones out there (albeit nothing compared to Mars), and tell me if you find parts of it that make you want to set up life in tank or if it all looks the same.
We evolved to be interested in the things that keep us alive or can kill us - other flora and fauna and water are the top of that list. We find variations of that endlessly interesting. Rock formations, not so much.
Man wants to conquer Mars but I don't to see the pitiful existence of those poor few fools who sacrifice themselves for our collective egos. Especially the first settlers who can't come back and beg for their lives over the video link constantly.
Well I guess it depends if you're an optimist or a pessimist about the thought of living in a remote, hostile place, doing science and research that may have extraordinary repercussions for the entire species.
Well to be fair, I grant you that certain people would find those awful conditions worth it for the sake of the mission. I just think the novelty will wear off and there won't be a stream of people heading off to colonise Mars.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to jump out of this deep gravity well just to be stuck on another one at our current technology levels. Instead asteroids will be much more inviting and the technology to harvest them will combat the large existential risk from rogue asteroids that is one of main arguments for the colonisation of other planets in the first place.
I'd much rather visit an asteroid than Mars, so I agree with you there - but I think there are other ways that Mars may become attractive to settlers - especially those who want to escape tyranny on Earth. If a settlement starts and survives, then whoever gets there and participates is literally building a new civilization from scratch. I think you might be a little naive in thinking there aren't a large number of willing people who want to do that, no matter the personal cost. There's a lot of potential.
The problem isn't the individual, its the society that has to pay for it. We can find the exploration of Mars a worthwhile thing in the abstract. But as a society that interest will wane in the face of the reality. Then we aren't going to be paying billions to ship misanthropes off to Mars to thumb their noses at us.
> But there could be parts of Mars we can transform, within a 100 years or so - just like the early settlers of every continent on Earth, ever in the history of mankind - and turn into a habitable place to live.
Mars' atmospheric pressure is 0.6% of Earth's. It's for all practical purposes a vaccum. Liquids boil away. You will die without some kind of suit even if you converted all the gases to nitrogen and oxygen.
Mars has 10% of the mass of Earth. Surface gravity is a third of Earth's. Long-term survival in low-gravity might be possible, but it will not be pleasant and it will mean returning to Earth will be effectively impossible.
Mars will never be habitable unless we assemble a whole new planet.
I can imagine a several large domes to protect people and crops from the atmosphere, but the threat of them being hit by a meteorite seems like a critical issue, unless we also shipped some AA or powerful lasers to combat them.
To build upon it a little bit: does everyone remember last Boston snowstorm and how everybody (who still had internet connection) cried and moaned that this is the absolute worst weather they've ever had?
Compared to Mars, Boston is so hospitable that you could name it Maui instead. I mean, you could practically open your window, look outside, and not freeze-dry to death in seconds.
Mars: for those who want to play basic survival hard-mode.
Mars is not as cold as you seem to think. From Wikipedia:
Differing in situ values have been reported for the average temperature on Mars,[20] with a common value being −55 °C (218 K; −67 °F).[21]
Surface temperatures may reach a high of about 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F) at noon, at the equator, and a low of about −153 °C (120 K; −243 °F) at the poles.[22]
Actual temperature measurements at the Viking landers' site range from −17.2 °C (256.0 K; 1.0 °F) to −107 °C (166 K; −161 °F).
The warmest soil temperature estimated by the Viking Orbiter was 27 °C (300 K; 81 °F).[23]
The Spirit rover recorded a maximum daytime air temperature in the shade of 35 °C (308 K; 95 °F), and regularly recorded temperatures well above 0 °C (273 K; 32 °F), except in winter.[24]
Your biggest problem with opening the window is not the cold, it's the fact that all of your oxygen is going to be going away, along with some depressurisation issues (although these aren't as bad as full space - Mars' thin atmosphere is sufficiently thick that something as simple as a wetsuit would be enough to avoid most of the nasty effects on the human body).
Not necessarily. It should be possible to grow nearly any spice or vegetable, if the greenhouse is complex (and computer controlled) enough.
When you have a couple hundred people or more, living for a year (or more) on a base, it would probably make sense to have great food. There will be so few creature comforts (like you point out), they'll perfect what they can.
Remind me "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" from Philip K. Dick. Selected (clever) people are sent as settlers on Mars, but everybody know it's crappy as hell and that people are surviving thanks to drugs which allow them to remind theirselves what Earth's like. People try to get crazy on Earth to fail tests and avoid being sent there.
... for the first few generations, until people figured out how to live there.
People are pretty good at that. Look into native American tribes that lived in the arctic, or ancient peoples who lived in harsh deserts. People would eventually figure out ways of building, living, entertaining, eating, moving, etc. that made the best of what the environment had to offer.
The assumption is that nobody would be interested in making a massive investment of effort and personal hardship to create the potential of a new future.
> The assumption is that nobody would be interested in making a massive investment of effort and personal hardship to create the potential of a new future.
My hypothesis is actually that the most vocal Mars dreamers are escapists and, as such, have latched on to the idea of Mars vs. the reality of Mars. Go into any forum where living on Mars is discussed, and the focus is on how cool it would be, or how you wouldn't be encumbered by political contingencies, or how much science you could do, or how science-fictiony it would all be. It all revolves around how removed from familiar experience that Mars would be, around how thrilling it is.
As a matter of emphasis, this is just unrealistic. Your bones will be disintegrating and your muscles atrophying. You'll constantly be stuffy. You'll be breathing stale air. There will be toilets, and people's shit will stink. You'll get rejected by girls on Mars, and have the occasional erectile dysfunction. There is no Internet on Mars. Instead of browsing, you'll be unclogging toilets and scrubbing away mold. You are going to pay rent on Mars, and it is going to be really, really high. All for a "future" that belongs to those who will live long after you die.
You live in space right now, and it's a really nice part of space; It has air and food and water and everything. Most of your manufacturing and other work is performed by a local underclass and an overseas underclass at discounted wages.
Mars enthusiasts don't talk about that. They talk about the Dream of Mars. Until the day-to-day realities of living on Mars, and not the romance (which you have even done!), are treated in a realistic manner in the discourse of Mars, I don't think that people are really engaged with the actual endeavor.
Everybody needs a hobby, though. Mine is complaining on the Internet.
By that logic, life should have stayed in the sea.
... And yes, there are loads of sci fi heads who talk about this stuff without thinking about it deeply. But those are just noisy internet fanboys and fangirls. It doesn't mean everyone interested in this topic is thinking about it in such a shallow way.
I came up with a shorthand description a while back: cross Everest ascent with WWI submarining. Something like that.
If I were younger, with no kids, and had the opportunity to do it, I would seriously consider it. I would want to spend many years training, studying, and doing terrestrial experiments first though. The way to do terribly hard things is not by being reckless; there's already enough unknown unknowns, you want to be as thorough as you can about preparing for the knowns.
We could create large simulated environments here to test things like construction techniques and survival strategies, which would be a very good idea. If the transportation capability materializes, I hope to see teams doing that.
I also think you are underestimating ingenuity, especially very highly motivated ingenuity. The horrible difficulty of life in "stock" habitats would be quite a motivator.
There's a big difference between "it's really cold out here" and "I literally can't breathe the air". Also, making the best of a horrible environment could make it less horrible, but doesn't mean it wouldn't still be pretty horrible.
I am certain you are correct that anyone who posts on the internet saying they'd personally like to live on Mars probably hasn't given it as much consideration as they would if they were actually given the opportunity. Posting on the internet about moving to Mars is a much smaller commitment than moving to Mars.
So you're saying I shouldn't want to marry another guy because you personally don't want to, and your pet peeve is that anything you don't want to do annoys you if others want to do it? Your pet peeve is pretty stupid.
I am convinced that the first stage of colonising Mars should be orbital space stations rather than land bases. The vacumn of space seems like a far less hostile environment than the surface and one that humans have experience of from the ISS.
Any long term base on Mars is going to require constant resupply from Earth. So why not leave as much as possible safely in orbit, and make short excursions to the surface when neccessary?
The problem is radiation from solar storms. There is no protective magnetic field. On the ground, it is possible to go underground for those periods, in space, not so much. There is no light-weight option for shielding all that radiation, and being exposed to all of those your whole life is really bad.
> You will have the constant whirr of machinery. You will have to plan outings down to the last bottle of O2. You will eat shit food. And you will gaze upon a dim Sun through a dusty porthole
Swap O2 for money and this could describe the life of many city dwellers on Earth. At least you won't have to put up with city traffic!
What you actually mean here is that you project what you care about in life onto literally every other human and foolishly imagine they all have the same standards for what matters to them.
This is of course false.
You're not suited for life on Mars. That's fine. Don't go.
I think he's just trying to point out some of the unexpected aspects of "going to Mars", and there certainly is a set of the population of people who think they want to go to Mars, but actually would not enjoy the practicalities of life on Mars.
It is to those folks that I am guessing his comment is addressed.
Which would be fine if they were actually unexpected. But it takes about five minutes for someone to point them out in any conversation about life in space.
It's not that far-fetched a description of what people in general like to do. After all, we punish social transgressions by confining people to quarters, drastically limiting their ability to go outside (or to move around much at all), and serve them formulaic food.
I agree with the GP. Most mars-lovers would love a working holiday there, due to the exotic nature of the place. But there's a difference between 'working holiday' and 'rest of your life in a (large) canister'. And you better hope that you get along well with your co-colonists...
It's not like HN goes stale that fast. That's simple. have a script that fetches HN along with linked sites hourly. When you want to browse HN, look at the latest snapshot.
Quick server-side interactivity would not work I guess, but there are enough sites without that to keep you busy a lifetime on mars.
And to think people on the other thread were criticizing rms' browsing technique of having the website scraped and sent to him by email. He's way ahead of us - ready for Mars!
> Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.
Well, living in a tin can would suck, but in theory there'd be huge underground caverns with overhead lighting. Maybe even rainforests and lakes in caverns.
Anyway, I'm not sure Mars even makes sense vice the Mercury and Venus ideas floating around.
No mention of interest in programming. That would be a lovely way to pass the time and create some useful things. If not for leisure, perhaps to improve the environment (but that could be dangerous, one mistake and they're dead).
It is awesome to think that martians would code on their own machines, but information is one of the only things that is free to transport over planets and almost without delay. In reality, due to their scarcity, first settlers will perform exclusively physical tasks, software will be updated and fixed remotely, and repairs will be performed following strict instructions or advice from Earth.
Coding as relaxation is plausible, but mostly for short projects and nothing serious. It is hard to focus on serious mental activity after laborious work.
> but information is one of the only things that is free to transport over planets
The marginal cost in terms of power may be very small (compared to a rocket), but the infrastructure costs are enormous, and as a result you're severely capacity-constrained.
Current link to Mars Odyssey from DSS 35 in Canberra is 14.22 kbps (roughly equivalent to a modem from 1991).
software will be updated and fixed remotely, and repairs will be performed following strict instructions or advice from Earth
Sounds like a major flaw to me. What if communication back to Earth is disrupted? Having the entire mission rely on a communication link is not a good idea. The people on Mars should be totally capable of conducting all manual repairs and bugfixes on their own. All of the software they use to run the entire base should be open source, available in a local Martian repository, and at least two of the people on the planet should be intimately familiar with the codebase and how all of the equipment works.
Ideally, they should also have physical books documenting all of the mission-critical stuff.
It depends on the size of the base. If your population ever broke 10,000 then having a few programs might be a good idea. But, redundant radios are cheap and your probably better off sending an extra doctor / pilot / geologist / engineer / biologist etc for your first few hundred people.
After-all having a working terminal that let's someone code is a hell of a lot more complex and uses a lot more power than a radio.
PS: This ends up getting back to the huge cost benefit of sending rover instead of people. Sure if you ever built up a self sustaining base including the ability to manufacture everything it needs from replacement parts, to CPU's, food, and fuel then sure send people. Until then you don't actually get any redundancy from sending people there.
If every computer data on a Mars mission dies, I think all the colonists aree dead. We aren't anywhere close to the technology to support colonists on Mars without technology. Ergo, "physical books" are just a waste of weight.
How does that follow? There are billions of computers on Earth. On Mars there may be fewer than one hundred. The odds are not even remotely comparable.
Secondly, if all of the computers on Earth die we can still go outside and breathe the air, drink water from rivers and lakes, gather plants and hunt wild game for food. None of those options are available on Mars. If the computer controlling life support suddenly fails, what options are there to survive? All of this has to be planned for and taken into account. If there is nobody on Mars capable of repairing the life support system (including its software) then they are utterly dependent on the communication link back to Earth.
Stack Overflow releases a quarterly archive[0] of all their data which is only a few gigabytes.
If I had access to a couple Computer Science books, all the documentation for my languages and the entirety of Stack Overflow at my fingertips? I think I could do just fine.
If I wanted to take it a step further, I could download common libraries that I thought would be useful. I've been learning Rust lately, and I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of all 2000 libraries in Cargo and it still wouldn't be that big.
I'm one of those people who do their best work when put under serious constraints. I think 520 days devoted to programming and study with no access to the outside internet would be a neat opportunity.
> I bet I could write a script to download every git repo of
> all 2000 libraries in Cargo
Funnily enough, the Rust developers have actually already written that script, and they run it weekly in order to determine that there have been no stability regressions in the nightly version of the compiler. :)
It's not really; it's about the same difficulty that it ever was. We've just become very lazy (i.e efficient) when it comes to solving our own problems. Over the course of 520 days, you might be amazed at what you could figure out on your own if you had no other choice.
Why do you narrow your view of programmers so much in that one statement? Just because someone doesn't fit your definition doesn't make it true. Innovation is built on the foundation of other people's work. Man pages are not source for all human knowledge. People like you irk me to no ends.
I don't know where the line is drawn between 'programmer' and 'cut n paster'; but ams6110 has a point that once you have enough foundational information on a particular stack then anyone calling themselves a programmer should be able to run from there. If you can't problem solve once you have the core information then I'd say ams6110's statement is accurate. Especially if everything you're working with is open source.
1) you should launch your own contest to select 6 people to volunteer living under similiar conditions - but with unlimited netflix streaming access, vip access.
2) launch a weekly show just talking about what they watched.
3) then get audiences to recommend what the folks in the room should watch, through social voting/recommendation
that said, i'd imagine that most people in their lifetime may end up watching more than what the folks would watch in ~500 days
I was unaware that entertainment providers were responsible for "helpful" studies with nothing of lesser importance permitted. Thank you for setting the record straight.
"“I missed the world in general. Seeing things move, seeing cars, dogs, the sun. My colleagues were amazing, and I couldn’t have picked better people to be locked up with, but you start missing meeting new people on nights out, the social variety,” he said. “For me, that was the trickiest part.”"
This seems to be a recurring theme in isolation experiments and have shown up in movies recently. In the movie, "I Am Legend" its clear Will Smith attempts to keep himself sane by using his imagination to create some kind of human interaction. I found it to be a profound theme running through the movie.
I think above all, this is a primary factor with the human condition. It's the need for social interaction. Without it, we don't seem to do very well.
This makes prefect sense. The worst thing you can do to punish a person in prison (which is a pretty bad punishment to begin with) is solitary confinement.
This is really interesting, particularly because there's no mention of problems. Many isolation experiments haven't ended with everyone happy with each other, so I'm curious if this team had any of the same issues. Does anyone know?
If they didn't have issues, I wonder how much could be chalked up to the teamwork they experienced while playing counter strike...
But they missed a crucial and very big stressor if they want to compare it to a real space stay... that of being out of reach of ANY possible help.
Imagine one of them gets an aliment of somekind that gets life-threatening. Ethics would dictate that here, the person would be evacuated. On Mars? Not so much.
Just that knowledge alone could be a remarkably stabilizing influence on someone's Psyche.
I think a lot of contemporary ethics have to be questioned in this scenario. At what point, if any, do we sacrifice someone in order to prevent the potential spread of disease to the others? How do we feel about the death penalty? Euthanasia without explicit consent?
The things we expect here are no longer practical. Forensics experts for alleged crimes, not to mention judges, juries, and lawyers.
I spent a few months sharing quarters with other soldiers when i was in the Army.
We got to go outdoors, run about, work and relax. regardless, the urge to kill started to rise up in all of us.
I don't think we're going to go interstellar until we can deal with things like euthenasia (say you break a leg, or are crippled?) is Mars wheel chair friendly. And ageing, low gravity is a killer for bone density.
The article say they spent a fair amount of time playing counter-strike. So you could say that a sizable portion of their time was dedicated to killing each other.
I too think that's the biggest problem -- doesn't matter how well you get along with the certain people, after spending too much time in the same (shared) room with them, something (even innocent, trivial things) starts to annoy and this feeling gets stronger and stronger with time and after a while - unbearable. I shudder even thinking about spending the rest of my life sharing small apartment with the same people and no way out.
The most important lesson they learned was to never pick up what looks like a used tissue.
I doubt that this is the first time 6 men wasted a year of their life playing CounterStrike. But it's probably the first time 6 men wasted a year playing CounterStrike and also pretending to be astronauts. Credit to them tho, because I couldn't do it. The last thing I'd want is 5 other fellahs doing their business in close proximity to me 3-4 times a day. I hope they were well paid.
I'm kind of surprised that they had books and videogames, but then it's not supposed to be a prison. I guess it's feasible to play Counter Strike on Mars after all.
You could play any kind of turn based games over planets. In the future even non-turn based games are going to be played, although indirectly.
A fun game would a real time military strategy game where the delay for both planets is artificially made the same. Then the command delay becomes part of the game, but the game still runs in real time with information updating as soon as it is available.
Because mechanical parts (and the way they are controlled) sometimes are built to compensate for gravity, so the absence of it might change the way it functions.
But how long will they work compared to the right way up? I can imagine that running it on the side will have unequal distribution of forces and thus wear for example.
There are consumer products that have them mounted sideways (e.g. I think one of the xboxes?), so it seems like they're reliable enough for consumer electronics standards.
"it can be concluded that the powerful stressful condition of prolonged containment in an isolated module had no “dramatic” effect on the state of the intestinal microbiota and did not lead to significant negative consequences for the health of the participants of the experiment. "
Exactly! Which is why I said something LIKE. :) There's literally nothing more fun than creating your DnD campaigns; it would be so cool to construct worlds involving interplanetary trade -- which incidentally, is one of that Star Wars RPG's strengths and also why I mentioned it.
They should test for hopelessness. If you put yourself in a simulation, you know that you will get out of it eventually. That gives hope and motivates you to keep going. In real-life scenario, you might be on Mars without possibility of going back.
Isn't the survival of our species in the event of a global catastrophe half the reason we want some people living on Mars? Surely five of those people should be women.
I think there's great value in building a Mars base as a intermediate step to terraforming. We're still a long ways away from terraforming technology, and there is a lot we could learn with a permanent base on Mars.
if folks have not already read "The Martian" by Andy Wier, take a look. it is pretty cool robinson-crusoe'sque survival thing, easily devoured over a weekend...
The idea of Mars is spectacular and wondrous and ecstatic and beautiful. Actual Mars sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.