I love how, for certain individuals, the idea of changing an entire planet atmosphere from basically 0 is more credible than us having an impact on our own climate.
Very few people looking at going to Mars today are interested in terraforming. As Sabine mentioned, terraforming is probably something for consideration a few centuries from now and I think she is correct. Additionally, many people interested in Mars, such as Musk, are also very concerned about climate change on Earth. These two interests stem from the same fundamental concern, which is long term survival of the species. We want both Earth and Mars to have a thriving population, not just one or the other, so maintaing a healthy planet is very important in addition to occupying Mars. Case in point, Musk has long been very focused on making EVs and Solar panels through Tesla in an explicit attempt to help decarbonization efforts. Edit: I may have originally misinterpreted your post, as I believe you are highlighting the role of climate denial, which is also crazy to me that it still exists. I'll keep the above response still for the discussion.
"We often get up in our daily lives (mainly because Tesla doesn't pay enough, and wont unionize) but why not think long-term and strive for a million year civilization? no a 100-million year civilization, i mean a gazillion year civilization. just give me your money." -honest lonny musk
@@jeremiahcutright81 You said: "Musk . . . . very concerned about climate change on Earth. These two interests stem from the same fundamental concern, which is long term survival of the species." Musk is just cranking everyone with Hollywood doomsday sci-fi plots. But it is NOT first principals science. Unmitigated climate change is NOT an extinction level event. Neither is nuclear war. They would destroy modern civilization, yes but NOT THE SAME as extinction to the last person and should not be conflated. (But Musk conflates them all the time. Notice the emotional effect as emotions shut down reason.) Runaway green house effect, as on Venus, is not possible on Earth. As civilization collapses there would still be habitable regions at higher latitudes. Loss of population and industrialization would then self-limit further GHGs from human sources. Left to it's own devices the biosphere would eventually find a new equilibrium. As far as nuclear war, critical studies show even in all out nuclear war 1% of humanity or 90 million people still survive in remote regions, Southern Hemisphere and government bunkers. That's 90 million people with knowledge of modern science to rebuild. Compare with evolutionary bottleneck in our pre-history where a few thousand proto-humans went on to set the stage for modern civilization from only stone age technology. BTW, malicious AI easily follows humans to Mars so a Mars colony wouldn't help us much their either.
I'm a South African, and just looking at how empty Africa is because of deserts tells me that before we go away to hard to breathe places we can just make these deserts liveable. It's massive spaces.
Once we fill up all the empty spaces we'll be back to where we are now - in a far more crowded and degraded planet. We have to look to the solar system, though Mars is a particularly unappealing option. The moon, then O'Neill cylinders are fairly clearly the way ahead.
@@wojtek1582 I didn't say he was an angel, I said he was on the side of the angels and also said he had his faults. However, give me Musk any day rather than the frighteningly corrupt and authoritarian leaders with their boots on our necks.
Musk is a con. There's a reason he doesn't want to go to the moon first. It's because we've been 56 years ago! After 23 years, SpaceX still hasn't come close to achieving what NASA did in the late 60s and they probably won't for years or even decades. That's why Elon prefers referring to Mars instead, to avoid the comparison. SpaceX would look like losers if the goal was the moon. Same reason why he now claims Tesla will resolve AGI. They are ten years behind Google when it comes to self driving cars. Elon is promising in six months what he won't be able to deliver in his lifetime.
It's simple to generate a breathable atmosphere on Mars: you might remember Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated this at the end of Total Recall (1990). You just find an ancient alien installation, press your hand on the sensor, and voilà!
When william shatner went to space he said this: "The beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound (...) The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness."
The "problem" that Dr. Hossenfelder mentioned at 13:00 is not "in her face," it is *_in her imagination._* Well, the "change" part is true, but the "problem" (or "crisis" or "emergency") isn't. The scientific evidence compellingly shows that the "change" is modest and benign, and the proven *benefits* greatly exceed the hypothetical problems.
the average temperature on Mars is -81°F (-60°C), but temperatures can range from -225°F (-153°C) to 70°F (20°C)................machines barely work in antarctica btw.
You need to look at the difference between temperature and heat transfer. With the Earth's thick atmosphere (and all the water flying around), it's harder to stay warm at the South Pole than in Mars' colder but tenuous atmosphere.
Temperature is not the only issue to consider. The rate of heat transfer is also important. The thin atmosphere of Mars will not transfer the heat energy from items that quickly. Unless it is windy….
I am under the impression that Musk bought a tunnel boring company to build underground living facilities. Deep tunnels would use the surface rock to shield from solar wind irradiation, to contain air with minimal need for airtight sealing barriers, and also to moderate the extreme surface temperature swings. One challenge is how to make concrete-like wall segments for these tunnels on Mars with minimal water. Sending concrete from earth would be prohibitively expensive. Apparently there have been experiments to try making concrete from Mars regolith mixed with human blood. With a small nuclear reactor they could melt and fuse Mars rock directly into wall segments.
the lack of interest in fixing earth might actually pose a much greater and immediate threat to our species than not colonizing other planets. it would be much easier to fix earth than to fix a planet with no atmosphere.
The thrill of living on Mars is envisioned in Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," where life is so grim a powerful hallucinogen is used to give colonists a reason to live.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact, it's cold as hell. Adding this link since apparently a lot of people have never heard of Rocket Man ua-cam.com/video/GELJ7QhRT20/v-deo.html
Here's the most important question: WHY MARS??? We have a perfectly good Moon that's 100 times more useful and practical. Let's build stuff on the moon first! Like a space port, launch sites for future missions, science labs, observatories, a space shipyard, some factories to move the industry off planet... I find it really bizarre that the billionaires aren't competing for the Moon. It's the most obvious and most sensible first step in establishing our permanent presence outside Earth. We could go to Mars at some point in the future and do stuff there, but I think that focusing on it right now is a mistake.
A major asteroid impact on Earth would send ejecta flying into space at hypersonic speeds. Any civilisation on the Moon would likely be destroyed since I presume you'd want your civilisation facing Earth for communications purposes. Certainly if the Moon had an atmosphere with oxygen even the Far Side would not be safe.
@@woodybrison She didn't deal with that point. Where did she deal with it? Give me a timestamp. She made some general comments but did not specifically reference the risk to a lunar colony which is what I address. The video is full of inaccuracies, misleading statements and unevidenced assertions. Just to take one example she says there is water at the poles on Mars without explaining that there is water present at numerous locations on the planet, even in equatorial regions. Her understanding of economics is weak. She seems to think that Mars and Earth are a zero sum game where anything done on Mars is a loss to Earth. Tell that to Silicon Valley, which got its start in life mainly through the space industry including the lunar landing programme. Also, Musk is not saying Mars can't have a great unsubsidised economy, he's talking about the initial capital investment.
If the moon turns you on then go for it. Me? I'm for Mars simply because it is a different world filled with challenges. When I'm there discovering new and exciting things I'll think of you being bored on the moon.
I think it's a brilliant idea! What he needs to do is take all the most important people in the world and have them colonise mars. Politicians, billionaires, social media influencers, CEOs of major corporations, etc. They could all start a super society on Mars. Don't worry about those of us left behind, we'll bumble through somehow.
You named the exact sort who do not need to be involved in such an effort. They regularly create all sorts of problems here on this planet well after the creation of society and laws.
Yes, I think it's very likely that we'll see some habitats on the moon in the next decades. But there are space agencies working on that already, so no need for Musk to do it. The issue with the moon is though that (leaving aside the nuke issue) that it's just too small to ever hold an atmosphere.
@@SabineHossenfelder why should we bother with the moon even? why can't we just pretend all the inhabitable parts of earth now, is the moon or mars or whatever. We just have to pretend the atmosphere is not breathable. Then when earth actually becomes uninhabitable, we don't have to move to a different planet.
As a practice run they could terraform the Sahara desert. Plenty of oxygen, relatively easy to supply with food and water (compared to Mars), and protected from harmful radiation. However difficult it would be to terraform the Sahara, Mars would be many, many times harder. If we can't terraform the Sahara, there is simply no way we can do Mars. Edited to add this: I only mentioned the Sahara as a comparator of difficulty of terraforming Mars. I am well aware there are a raft of problems associated with terraforming the Sahara that have nothing to do with the terraforming itself. I admit it was my mistake. I should have known that tongue-in-cheek does not translate to the written word. Having said that. I will not reply to any more comments telling me how bad terraforming the Sahara would be.
Terraforming the sahara, that sounds like a brilliant idea. But would the countries involved consent to it? Would that disrupt some sort of equilibrium already there. Where would the water come from to realize it. Solarpowered desalination of ocean water maybe.
@@peskyfervid6515 terraforming the Sahara desert is trivial most of it is under sea level so a couple hundred mile on Canal from the Mediterranean will fill it with water and transform it back to the temperate region. It was 10,000 years ago. But it’s also a tiny fraction of the size of Mars. It doesn’t offer the benefits of expanding humanity to other planets. Terraforming Mars will be very hard and it’s not something that we have the resources for anytime soon, but it will start within the next hundred years and probably be successfully completed within a few hundred years after that. Humanities destiny is to move out into the solar system where there’s space for trillions of people to live and unlimited power from 24 hour sore. We will build Dyson swarms with giant solar collectors over the next few thousand years.
The Sahara is not a closed system. We could radically change the environment there for sure, but not without knock on effects that people would not like.
the reason people want to start over at new planet is due to politic, you want to open a settlement on sahara where nearby country are hostile is just pure stupid, the settlement would be ravaged and the settlers would be killed and raped by militia there
The Sahara used to be a huge lake/ocean, and the nutrients from that get blown south to fertilize the rest of Africa. You would create a new barren area in Africa if you tried to terraform it
If you look out the window you only see red, forever, whereas on the ISS you gain a new perspective of the world that you have spent your entire existence looking at from one angle. Living on mars would be like a never ending covid lockdown.
Agreed. But Mars could - if all goes well - prove to be a good example for Earth. This isn't such an odd idea. Leaving aside the immoral aspects of imperialism, the European colonies in places like the US, Australia and New Zealand did actually pioneer female rights and progressive employment policies and set a new standard.
@@owenlouisdavid 1) our current technology isnt good enough, remember, Mars has little atmosphere because it doesnt have a magnetosphere, and it doesnt have that because THE CORE IS FROZEN COLD. 2)the cost is prohibitive to bring people into space, much more to another planet.
@@owenlouisdavid Despite the relentless campaign of vilification, the British Empire was the VERY BEST Example of a "Civilising Empire" that -- actually -- brought MORE progress and development than it "assett-Stripped". (Compare with the utterly rapacious Spanish and Belgian Empires, for example)!
@@robjohnston1433 No, trade would have just as well brought the developments without as much exploitation. It's incredibly ignorant to assume that other nations couldn't have developed further without British inference. The British deserve all the vilification for their misdeeds which solely to exploit, as does any nation for whatever is in it's past that it might otherwise claim to be against.
why does the government refuse to fire boeing? who was the idiot that gave boeing the contract? they arent stuck, the government just finds itself totally unable to admit that using boeing was really really stupid. they can be brought down any day they are willing to admit that fact.
They are not stuck. NASA decided that instead of paying for special rescue flight by SpX they would rather have Suni and Butch stay on ISS and do research while NASA reshuffles schedule of future crews to have seats to bring them down "for free"
humans have had the ability to destroy human life on earth for the last 70 years or so. Thats a serious problem. All it takes is a mad dictator on his death bed to start a nuclear war.
Best comment. Quite weird that some poeple on this channel envy scientists the few thousand dollars they get as a salary for working on particle physics, but at the same time think that wasting trillions of dollars on a useless project of colonizing mars or the moon is a good idea.
Except it is a real problem. Some people never learned anything in science class. A world ending event isn't an if, it is a when. If we don't get off this planet humanity will end. The facts are crystal clear. Some of us care about our children and the future. Some of us only care about the Kardashians.
@@billtwok6864it’s a long term problem. We absolutely do not have the technology to make it work. Maybe in 50-100 years. I assume you will be one of the first to volunteer to go lol
Came here for this comment. Funny how "leaders" are loose and fast with volunteers to space and soldiers to war, yet they're never on those frontlines, themselves. Hmm.
Something to talk about yes. We need a series of technological breakthrough. Let me give an example ; For comparison, building a space habitat large enough to call it a city is far easier than terraforming Mars.
I am all for it, would love to see a habitat like that. And in the far future we could have them closer to Jupiter and Saturn, so many moons, so many possibilities.
@@anafreitas1646 so many radiation.... the problem with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, at least the large ones which are closer in, is the strong magnetic field of those worlds. Radiation is also a problem on Mars, but not unsurmountable, o Jupiter's moons, you'd be dead in days.
For starters, ask yourself the following about living on Mars: "Would I trust that politicians to continue to fund me when the shine wears off? Do I believe that war, financial crisis, or similar will never interfere with the supplies to Mars? Will billionaires funding me on Mars never go bankrupt and will put my life / welfare ahead of their own interests? Are all the support systems going to remain intact until we are self-sufficient in 300 to 800 years?"
I read a sci fi book decades ago where that happened. The first mission to another star - they were barely a few years into the journey when Nasa was de-funded. The mission relied on a laser powered by the sun and some really big lenses. Years later, when the political climate changed, they had to scramble to salvage the mission.
The idea is that the Mars colony would eventually be self sufficient. If it isn't it can't serve its stated purpose. Of course, we'd have to actually have the technology and resources to make that happen, and how long that will take is difficult to say.
@@PHIplaytesting E VEN CHOO AH LEE! Sorry, I couldn't help but think of Manuel of Fawlty Towers. Yes, we all get that. His question was, will that be soon enough? The first Virginia Colonists all died or disappeared before their next supply ship eventually arrived, on time, but too late.
Why would they chase us though? Let's say you are an evil AI that wants to grow. All you need is materials and energy, and both can be found in space. Mine a few rare earth asteroids and deploy your solar panels, space is comfy for them
@@terrylandess6072 Return to earth would be essentially free- rolled into the cost of going to Mars. Empty ships would be constantly going back to get more materials and colonists. That's the plan at least.
What's all the buzz about Mars? If we wanted to go somewhere red and inhospitable to life, there's loads of room left in Australia which is like 5 times closer.
I think we need to do BOTH. Care for Earth and start a small population on Mars. You don't need 1 million people to protect our genes. A few thousand are enough and this could be doable with Starship. Remember that such adventures ALWAYS boost the development of new technologies: Small fusion or fission reactors; create water, oxygen and fuel from the atmosphere, adopt our genes to Mars conditions etc.
Agree completely. The goal, Elon's, is to have a totally self sustaining colony on Mars . He has stated that it might need a base population of a million. I'm thinking AI, robots, nanotechnology , etc. in the coming decades will make that number much smaller.
An important detail: the innovations of NASA and the moon missions were essentially public domain, with universities, researchers, and society as a whole participating and benefiting. That was the general pattern of the scientific revolution as a whole. Private companies like Musk's silo their innovations greatly limiting their spread and the extremely valuable symbioses that happen in open research, while also claiming all the benefits to themselves. To himself, in Musk's case, to do with as he pleases.
No one ever talks about the reality of living full time on Mars. It would be absolutely miserable and the smallest mishap could mean instant death. You would probably have to live underground with very little opportunity to do much of anything but work 15 hours a day. The engineered systems would have to work flawlessly, all the time, to maintain a pressurized environment. We take for granted here on earth that if the HVAC system goes down we're merely uncomfortable, not dead in 6 minutes. Also, would it ever be self sustaining? We have no examples ever of a colony like this working long term. There is nothing Mars would have to trade with earth so it would be completely dependent on a constant stream of rockets from Earth to Mars. Of course we may also want to factor in the global warming costs of 100s upon 100s of rocket flights to Mars and back.
You should read my book, Marsworld. You'll realise then that this is all just Stay-Put propaganda. The "smallest mishap" won't mean death. Humans will rarely be conducting spacesuit EVAs. They will mostly explore in pressurised rovers. Any EVAs will be strictly controlled. On Mars wherever you go on an EVA you'll probably have your faithful robodog with you with all the emergency equipment you need. When the HVAC goes down? The people designing the mission aren't stupid. There won't be one system and there will always be back up and emergency systems. Don't forget there will be two human passenger Starships on the surface as refuges as well. We have examples of humans going to Mars on 11 missions and no one dying. That was with 1960s technology. Things have advanced hugely since then. Even if there were 10,000 Starship flights a year burning methane (a very clean fuel, nothing like petrol/gasoline or diesel) they would never get close to even 0.1% of all the oil, coal, and gas being burnt on planet Earth. For coal alone, 8.5 billion tonnes of coal is burnt each year. Why do Stay-Put fanatics make these spurious and unserious points?
The only thing to find on Mars are probably rare minerals needed on earth. It would be a mining colony. 1 Mio. people working as slaves without workers rights and no option to leave. The fever dream of a capitalist.
@@rowleyj31 That's an assertion. Where's your proof. Until we get there, no one can know but all the evidence suggests that since people have survived for over 400 days in a Zero G and emerged in good health, 0.38 G will not be a huge health issue.
I think that people are not thinking about all the simple things they would never be able to do again: Go for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, see wildlife, hear birdsong, visit their childhood haunts, travel overseas, go skydiving, etc. etc. It would be like living in your work building 24/7. Too bad if you suddenly feel like going shopping or working on your car. I just cannot believe that people think they could cope psychologically with the deprivation with very little hope of returning to Earth. I also wonder whether some of the people arguing this have ever lived in a rural community with few resources, or in a foreign country away from their possessions and friends and family. It's surprising how quickly you start to miss things once the novelty of the new place wears off. Now, it's a bit different now with the internet and Amazon marketplace- we are less dependent on local services, but I think people are still going to miss things- even if only the local kebab shop or the local mall. Just look at some housing developments that become social wastelands because they don't develop local services. You probably won't have a choice of doctors, access to a proper legal system, most of your friends and family, or a choice of hardware stores, camera shops, careers, aged-care facilities, holiday destinations, somewhere to "get away from it all". I think some people will cope and even thrive, so I do accept that.
There is one elephant in the room that no politician mentiones, since it undermines his own position. Mankind allways went from smaller organisation forms to more complex forms to improve living conditions, security.... From family to clan, from clan to village, from village to citystates, from citystates to realms, from realms to nations. Our way of life has outgrown the problem solution potential of nations. From resource usage, pollution, climate change, poverty, migration, capitalism (not in the sense of Karl Marx, but wealth accumulation by international companies).... Nations are no longer fit to solve global issues. Mankind needs to unite.
I think waiting for a good moment to have technology at high enough level is tricky. Often these technologies will get developed because you're doing something amibitious. If you waited instead, its possible they would never get developed in the first place.
The technologies mentioned in the video would be developed because of the massive impact they would have on life on earth. That would be why they are developed; making later space exploration easier is just a side benefit. If I got to decided where to put trillion dollars, there is a long list of earth based projects I would rather see accomplish first.
@@PravinDahal false. It's just that we can't build that ship anymore, because it was essentially made by artisans with tinsnips. Therefore we cannot replicate it.
You are talking as though humans are not inventive. Living on Mars will have to be vastly more advanced technologically than right now. But some people are afraid even leaving their own homes, don’t take their advice.
That's not that important: just import the microbes, and fertilise any crops we grow with the right mix of bacteria. And cultivate them, give them as supplements - like Yakult, or whatever.
@@thealmightyaku-4153 Which microbes? A randomly selected square yard of topsoil will probably contain scores, if not hundreds of mircobes as yet undescribed by science, and that's chicken feed next to what lives in the human gut.
Power and propulsion systems always come to the forefront of my mind when these topics come up. Not just for space travel but even for local global travel. Getting to where we want to go quickly and safely as well as transporting large amounts of cargo without needing large volumes of a fuel source is a major obstacle which really needs to be overcome before we start thinking about going so far from this ball which we are literally a part of structurally. We are the earth and the earth is us. A lot of people don't realize how much we are indistinguishable from the planet itself.
You are aware that there are, and have been, many science rovers working on Mars with just solar power. Some are still running after years of exploring.
About 50 years ago the Space Studies Institute of Princeton spelled out methods of creating space habitations, often using materials from the moon and placing them at locations such as Lagrange points. They would be rotating in such a way that gravity is simulated and could be done in tiers, some farther from center than others so that a variety of percentages of 1g, average earth gravity, can be achieved. Such a scheme could allow for those higher up to be used by those desiring to achieve greater strength and those lower down to be used by senior citizens to ease their mobility. In any case keeping something close to 1g would prevent the kind of bone degeneration
The guy who gave us the Cybertruck is going to preserve consciousness for a million years. Here is some reality: In this entire (excellent) video, not one word was uttered about human physiology. Permanent presence off the Earth will be radically different from space tourism. Mars has less than forty percent of the gravity our species has evolved to live in. That altered gravity will effect each and every part of the human body, bones to retinas, not to mention all the other wrenching environmental changes aside from gravity. Not one single baby has been concieved and carried to term in altered gravity, and this guy Musk is drawing up blueprints for cities on Mars. The way to colonize space is rotating wheel or tube cities. You can adjust the gravity. The environment would be livable, and closer to Earth in case of emergency. We do not yet have materials strong enough to handle the stresses, but they are in the pipeline, and that is where the effort should be going. Space Elevator and rotating structures. Not Hyperloops on Mars!
Space research has provided strong evidence that humans are almost exclusively "earthlings," we are inextricably locked to the home planet. (So too are "fish" locked to marine environments, they don't work well away from that.) Well, it's "only" $3 billion, the US government spends that much each and every day just for the operating costs for the day.
It’s a pipe dream because Movies have made it look like a “cakewalk” however, reality is, it’s anything but! Temperature vary from -225F to 70F with an AVERAGE of -68F and remember, even at 70F there is no breathable Air, you can’t just step out and walk around etc., etc…. Get real folks!
O'Neil colonies.. How do you get excited about life when you can look straight up and see... your neighbors? Youd need walls several feet or more of dirt/rock , maybe much more to protect these space colonies from the inevitable radiation, gamma burst meteor or asteroid impacts. I don't see it. You need a planet for gravity and an atmosphere with magnetic poles to reduce radiation and burn up most of what might hit the planet. Nobody wants to live an entire life or raise a family on some space station, can't image the psychological implications of that..
gravity isn't the problem. perchlorates in the soil as well as the fact that mars has no million year future as the ionosphere is nearly completely stripped off by the sun already.
In the 1980s I was a member of the L5 Society. I think building large rotating space colonies is much more feasible than colonizing Mars. imho, one of the biggest problems colonizing Mars is that it only has 1/3 G whereas a space colony could have 1 G.
Yes, Mars is a one-way trip. Anyone born on Mars who came to Earth would be carrying two more of themselves on their shoulders. They could do nothing useful and would probably die quite soon.
large rotating space colonies are an order of magnitude more difficult than building a sttlement on land. Eventually they will be built, but not for a long time still.
Speaking of rotating space habitats why not instead of trying to terraform mars we live in rotating space habitats around mars's orbit? Only using the planet to extract resources. It makes way more sense and will take way less time.
Why not start by building a habitat in the middle of the Gobi desert? You have gravity an air, and a fraction of the travel expense. And you still get away from the rest of humanity which is a hedge against global pandemics and political strive.
O'Neill cylinders would be a better bet. Easier to access, better solar power and without a gravity well, a ready made industry in asteroid mining is at their doorstep.
Historically, we - as species - never engaged in any exploration after properly preparations, we launched ourselves into the unknown as soon as it would be possible, disregarding anything else. From the first homo sapiens leaving Africa to Columbus navigating into America (not to mention the Vikings going to Greenland even before), the move was made as soon as technology allowed a minimal chance of success. Sometimes even sooner. In don't think we will wait to technology to mature before trying going to Mars. I think we will try at first opportunity. If we will succeed like Columbus, or slowly fail like the Vikings, I don't have a clue.
Some truth in what you say (though the Vikings got to America as well as Greenland). But it's also the case that exploration depends on the home culture. Think of China. In the 15th century they were sending huge naval expeditions into the unknown. And then, suddenly, there was a change of Imperial policy. The decision was made to look inward. China drew back on itself and lost interest in exploration. This is why you have to understand what the more serious people in the Stay-Put alliance are up to. There are extremists in the Green/Red-Green movement who hate the idea of exploration, especially exploration led by a billionaire, even a billionaire who builds electric vehicles. What they are trying to do is change the culture of the home planet into one that drastically reduces humanity's impact on Earth, one that emphasises risks and dangers and one that encourages a very parochial attitude based on that you might call "ideological science".
The Darién In 1698, Scottish banker William Paterson attempted to colonize the Darién in Panama, but the venture failed. The settlement was abandoned twice, and only a few hundred of the 2,500 Scottish settlers survived. The failure was due to poor preparation, an English trade ban, and a Spanish siege. The Darién's failure bankrupted Scotland and contributed to its unification with England in 1707. (Gemini AI)
No one ever talks about mars gravity. Humans cant live there for more than a couple years at a time without wrecking their bodies that evolved at much higher gravity.
Gravity, radiation, logistical problems, architectural problems, biological problems in relation to all of the aforementioned... the idea of colonizing Mars is a laughable joke at this point in history.
Well, there have been no long term studies at 38% of Earth's gravity so you cannot make that claim. Zero gravity definitely does but that's not the same.
There are simple centrifugal ways to simulate gravity. Also don't discount adaptation and evolution. Who knows, the long-term effects of low gravity on the human brain might be the key to developing warp drives.
@@ronaldckrausejr7762 Again: that is mostly a political problem. If people were free to buy and sell water, it would be way more available for those who need it. Turns out that politicians, especially on poor regions, put bureaucratic or legal barriers to trade. Or those regions are under wars, started by politicians.
The problems on Earth are scientifical: we don't know enough about ourselves, how to live on Earth in a durable sustainable and harmonic way. We need first to understand ourselves better, before we go messing up other places.
Mars is so often described in media, as Sabine has done, as our 'next neighbour planet' that the fact that it is not when it comes to average distance is generally overlooked. In describing Earth's 'next neighbour planet', look no further than Venus at 188 million kms distant from the Earth. Granted, Mars with its highly elliptical orbit swings by at between 56 - 401 million kms, however on average Mars at 225 million kms from Earth is (again on average) a good 37 million kms more remote than Venus.
Think of it this way. You're living out in the country a bit, about half a mile away is a state prison. They are your nearest "neighbors". About 3/4 miles away is an old recluse with a sour disposition. To whom do your refer to others as being your neighbors?
I remember reading estimates that a breathable atmosphere could be generated on Mars over a period of 100 to 300 years and that it would take 10 million to 15 million years to be stripped away. That would give any inhabitants plenty of time to develop a means of protecting that atmosphere, or they could user the same technology that generated the atmosphere to make up for losses.
Idk what's going on with Sabine but she just implied that the same people who could create a thick Martian atmosphere are too stupid to prevent it from being stripped away over millenia lol I facepalmed
The moon is so dependent on Earth that any calamity our extremely dangerous universe could throw at it would destroy both. A colony on the moon is leaving life's eggs in the same basket.
I think one of the minor points made in the fictional world of "The Expanse" - is that humans don't have the thousand-year stick-to-it-iveness to get Mars terraforming done, even after a major colony is established.
Sabine, I enjoy your videos! They add a realistic scientific viewpoint to the issues facing us. Personally, as a geological engineer, I am quite aware that we are living on the golden age of the planet. We are mining minerals and energy (coal, oil, gas, wood) and we can not expect them to be replaced. Recycling is not 100% efficient (think greater entropy) and we are quickly disseminating valuable and critical elements. Our current society is dependent on many elements such as rare earths, copper, aluminum etc. These will become too expensive to extract and then the technologies will begin to wither and we will go back in time. 1000 years from now we will be Stone Age again ( or worse) and there will be no returning as the resources will not be concentrated enough for Stone Age man to take advantage of. Depressing? Yes.
I appreciate your insights @keithbrown, and I completely agree that we are indeed living in a critical moment regarding resource management. The reality is that our planet's resources are finite, and we are rapidly approaching a point where they will become increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. With Earth Overshoot Day occurring earlier each year-this time on August 1, 2024-we're consuming resources at a rate that exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in a year. This unsustainable trajectory suggests that if we don't start exploring alternative sources of materials, such as those found on Mars or asteroids, we may find ourselves in a dire situation where essential elements become too costly or even impossible to obtain. Opening up new frontiers for resource extraction beyond Earth is not just a luxury; it's a necessity for the survival of future generations. By investing in space exploration and the potential colonization of Mars, we can tap into vast resources that could alleviate some of the pressure on our planet's ecosystem. Waiting for better technology to arrive could mean missing the window of opportunity to act. Just like how we can't afford to ignore the depletion of rare earth elements and other critical materials here on Earth, we also cannot afford to delay our efforts to secure resources from other celestial bodies. The time to act is now; otherwise, we risk returning to a much less advanced state as our current technologies falter due to resource scarcity.
My best guess is a future that is mixed low-tech with some enduring electronics. That is, if humanity doesn't go extinct by its own folly. Sky scrapers and ships could be mined for metal to make hand tools for a smaller population 100+ years from now.
I don't think anyone suggested we would. But there's no benefit to trying to escape Earth to escape problems. The problems are human caused - they will follow us anywhere we go. If we're going to Mars, it wouldn't be to escape climate change or nuclear winter - those are coming with us as they're human problems.
We managed to beat diseases. We brought illiteracy to a minimum. We learned how to feed the whole world. We created systems to share discoveries instantly. We are solving many problems.
Well i wouldnt say never, Like @m0n0deferia mentioned, all those things are fairly recent historywise, & in our lifetime we've seen computers go from fridge size to fitting in our pocket. Dont get lost in doupt, consider the negatives & the positives, look at the whole picture we can see the current problems but plenty others we have solved
Where does he say he's looking for tax-funded subsidies? Nowhere. I suspect he is gathering his own resources to create a piggy bank for on-Mars colonisation and maybe he's invited a few of his billionaire mates to add to it as well.
Mars is a boring desert planet. I can't go swimming, I can't go hiking, I can't go mountain biking. I prefer to live on our "fragile" planet. A colony on Mars ... is a recipe for a horror movie.
2:44 That is a textbook definition strawman. As far as i have gathered, the reason to stablish the mars colony is to prevent a mass extinction event that ends life on earth from wiping humanity altogether, not to "escape the problemas we have on earth".
If earth goes down mars goes down, the colony there will be totally dependent on earth forever. A colony there does nothing to ensure human survival, that is just a marketing trick by musk for his not so smart fans. On the contrary - the constant drain of this colony would speed up the overexploitation of earth even faster, and thus the end of humanity.
Basically European style thinking. Their adventures all moved to America and Australia ages ago. And the modern one all worked for Silicon valley and Elon freaking Musk. And all the while East Asians are busy copying and trying their hardest to catch up. That is why Europe is stagnating.
Uhhh… Mass extinction event on earth? The conditions in Mars NOW is much much worse than the conditions for mass extinction that will ever occur on earth. If earth is going to be hit by a huge asteroid, earth will still have an atmosphere with some breathable oxygen, some surviving sea animals, temperature more manageable than Mars, and WATER and GRAVITY. If you are going to build closed and insulated housing structures for human survival in Mars, you can also do that on earth with much less technical and resource challenges. Need I go on?
I mean, you can do both. Resources aren't as limited as they appear. However, a manned mission to Mars (even for a short time) would be an achievement at this point. Colonizing is something we're not remotely ready for as we can't even get ISS astronauts to be able to live there and it's MUCH easier to live on the ISS than on Mars.
Ehh... I think the possibility of giving humanity a fighting chance at survival (however low it may be) is more worth it than throwing away money to the corrupt & greedy politicians & CEOs of the world who would be in control of those investments on Earth.
The estimate I gave in my book Marsworld is around $18 billion for a ten year programme (ambitious but not startingly ambitious like Musk's timeline). It's not that expensive but $18 billion over 10 years equates to about 20 cents per person per annum. That's not going to solve any of our "big" problems.
End of story? Does that mean that is all the logic you can bring to bear on the topic. Your response is so typical for those brainwashed by Liberal education. Rhetorical question here: What percentage of your wealth do you donate to charity and solving the world's problems?
Musk can fund a Martian colony as a private enterpenaur without issues with legal red tape. He can't simply swoop in and force the world to cut all carbon power generation in the same way. So if you ignore the illusion that all money is part of a shared pool and try and figure out what one billionare can acheive long term within his lifetime (which is presumably still something the billionare cares about) then building an off world colony is the best bet at ensuring humanities survival.
I strongly believe that there should be research facilities on both Mars and the Moon. That will enable scientists to determine what conditions are truly like and what will be possible and impossible.
Yes, much more research to be done first. Example: we don't even know if mammalian species like our own can successfully bring a pregnancy to term at 1/3 earth gravity. Musk is getting WAY ahead of himself on Mars.
You don't need people for that, it would just be more expensive. Scientifically, even sending people to space at all did not make much sense. It did to some point in the early days because robotics were bad, but today the only meaningful research which needs humans in space is exploring, how humans can live in space. And that probably will not be really useful for hundreds of years.
Hi Sabine. You don't need a pop filter for the SM7B. The SM7B comes with 2 different windscreens (the foam on the mic). You have the default one on currently. If you use the bigger one that came in the box for the mic, you'll have all the plosive control you'll ever need.
Yup, but saying there is no interest is false. A couple thousand is already the critical mass needed. Over time more and more will join once the Mars colony gets more pleasant.
Yeah these naysayers are silly. There are plenty of people that would go immediately as soon as it is possible. The last hundred years is the first time in the history of mankind that there is no frontier and there will always be some percentage driven to go into one if it is possible. That is just the nature of humanity.
@@PeteQuad And the people were looking for a better life, sometimes the paradise. Mars is nothing like that, it is far more hostile than Antarctica. And you can not get there for a few cheap dollars.
I disagree on the point of "first develop needed technology, then move to use it" - human progress is by and large about pressing forward despite not having all the eggs in the basket sorted properly (or some such metaphor) and figuring out, along the way, how to do it well enough to succeed. What impetus is there to develop mars colonization technology without being on Mars? Without a concentrated geopolitical will - which is currently unfeasible for anyone except the Chinese - there can be no long term planning that is needed for this kind of "prepare to go, then go". The only thing that can bring westerners to Mars is a startup mantra of "start going and figure it out as you go".
I'm having a hard time imagining a colony on Mars without a dentist, a surgeon, a medical lab with all its updated supplies, a hardware supply, and all the everyday support infrastructure we presume to take for granted. It would be a rare breed who could endure the nonstop challenge of bare existence.
@btpcmsag that's why you're not an explorer - explorers don't ask "who will take care of my teeth when I get to my destination", they just go, and they'll figure out the teeth situation when they get there (or not, as the case may be).
@@btpcmsag that's because you're not an explorer. Explorers don't ask "who will take care of my teeth when I get there?" They just go, and the teeth situation will take care of itself (or it won't, as the case may be).
Due to Mars' rotation around the sun after Sunday, January 12, 2025 the next window of opportunity for us to reach Mars will be in 2035. Outside of that window it is out of reach for the most part.
Theoretically using fusion power and travelling near speed of light and resulting time dilation (slow aging of the traveler) solves that problem. In practice, Elon is far away from solving that problem (travel at >90% of c in Star Ship version 100, not too late and still affordable - nearly impossible combination of sub-goals).
He was talking about going to Mars like you are going on a little trip. If the average person can’t afford a home or healthcare here - Space Travel? How will you afford to live there, like how much does Air cost? Water? Food? Heating? Space Suits? Renting the Pod you live in, in the Municipal Pod you live in that has good air, your AirPod. Will he pay for people to live there?
@@vishalmishra3046 'Near speed of light'? Mars is a long way away, but nowhere near far enough to reach even half of the speed of light. There are limits to acceleration.
Four crew can land, set up a solar panel array, an RTG power source, and use electric ATV's to dig out a four foot deep landing spot and place a beacon. One large Bigelow habitat with wheels could be landed at, or near, the beacon and moved into position. Vaccuum pumps inflate the Bigelow hab with Mars CO2. It should hold its shape once filled. The crew then moves a lot of Mars regolith (with ice in it) inside and puts it into plastic tubs. Use Moxie units inside the hab to change the CO2 to oxygen, use space heaters to provide heat, and open a nitrogen cylinder to provide a buffer gas and 5 psi internal pressure. The heat and pressure gets you liquid water that is already in the regolith. The crew then uses the electric ATV's to move regolith on top to provide protection from cosmic rays. The crew enters, removes their Mars suits, and washes the percholorates out of the regolith. They then set up hydroponic growing and plant vegetable seeds in the plastic growing tubs. The vegetables will remove CO2, produce oxygen, and be food. This habitat will be almost completely self sufficient.
I wrote a paper on this topic 10 years ago. Elon actually read it and modified his rap on the subject. The bottom line is that a self-sustaining colony is at least 1,000 years in the future. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on the project.
@@VuyaniMagibisela So let me guess. Pile bricks randomly to see if we build a house is the way to go? Nope. We need to design the house first, then build the house, test it on the moon and learn, and then go to Mars. For all practical purposes, the moon is a better training ground. Mars has almost no atmosphere, so there is not so much difference with the moon. And you have nasty dust on the moon and nasty perchlorate dust on Mars.
@@josepablolunasanchez1283 yeah I agree with that, what I don't agree with is not doing it or focusing on it, let's start now let's not all focus on earths problems let others start with the exploration of space, we started on the moon and we go beyond.
@@VuyaniMagibisela Space colonies are houses, real estate. If we do not care about it we should ban Earth real estate too. Space transportation is trucks, if we do not like it we should ban trucks too. So space is just as earthling business as any other business. Going to space and populate it is like creating Las Vegas in the middle of nothing. Should we ban Las Vegas? The amount of scientific illiteracy of people is so appalling.
Uh oh, don't let Elon hear you, or he'll start boring everyone with his boring company junk again. I agree with you, to a deg🎉ree. At least, we could build a Musk "colony" deep in a disused coal mine, and see how the volunteer residents fare. If they hate it, we can call it a prison
In a billion or so years the sun will become a red giant before it it burns out and becomes a tiny white dwarf star. However once it becomes a red giant, the Earth will be reduced to a cynder and perhaps even completely disintegrated. Living under ground will not save anyone.
The problem with Mars colony is that it's so easily wiped out. One unexpected event/storm/meteor in wrong place can destroy the one million people colony. Humankind on earth is partly so resilient because we are spread geographically on large area, basically whole planet.
If the Mars colony has a 1-100 chance of being wiped out every year, and humans on Earth have a 1 in 1000 chance of being wiped out every year, any time that humans on earth are wiiped out, there is a 99% chance we survive still on Mars, and can return to earth to repopulate.
Right. Plus, a Mars colony would be powerless against malicious AI which could merely hack into already necessary robotics and AI on Mars or even send their own rockets. If you actually do a critical evaluation of possible 'extinction to last person' scenarios on Earth, NONE of them are served by a Mars colony. It's all just Musk 'riffing' on sci-fi themes. But not first principals science.
I love your work. Your intelligence and wit are so much fun. I appreciate you pointing out what needs to be stated about the logistics and timing. As well as the resources that would be better used both here and now for so many essentials it's to much to list. Thank you
lack of gravity? on mars? its close to HALF Earths gravity. thats fine for us. a little working out will solve that. plus we ADAPT. future colonists will have it easier and easier.
@@TheSighphiguy We don't really know much yet about the long term effects of reduced gravity (and nothing at all about fetal development in those conditions). We also don't know much about our ability to keep closed environments healthy for a VERY long time (hint: bacteria and viruses evolve much much faster than us). Imagine setting up to colonize Mars in a grand scale and realizing after a decade that people there develops all sort of debilitating physical conditions, can't give birth to healthy children, gets all sort of nasty infections from mutated bacteria and viruses that we can't purge from the habitats, and can't even get back to Earth because re-adaptation to 1 G is too risky... those are real possibilities. We talk a lot about our current lack of geo-engineering skills to terraform Mars, but I feel that we should rather ask ourselves if our bio-engineering skills are up to the task.
@@rp3351 i was only speaking to the "gravity" on Mars. not "terraforming. We should ignore Mars for now(colonywise) and focus on the Moon. baby steps...
@@TheSighphiguy yeah we should definitely gather more expertise about living off-earth for long time before plotting the conquest of Mars. Outposts on the Moon, new and bigger space stations orbiting Earth, possibly with centrifuges to simulate martian gravity...
@@TheSighphiguyLes than half the gravity will cause more than half the problems, but when it comes to accelerated genetic damage, that could well be a big problem still. And the gravity of a planet is not something we can ever terraform.
He will go and will fund it mostly itself like he is funding the starship program mostly himself. The whole idea behind starlink is to be a money generator to support the mars mission.
On the point of volunteers: I personally know a couple of people who volunteered for that. Not everyone value their lives above the excitement of the unknown ))
I don't want to go to Mars, but Near Earth Orbit is even less hospitable and yet you have people queuing up to become astronauts, so I am dubious nobody would want to go.
One of my old profs had met and spoken to some of the Apollo astronauts, and he asked them if they would have volunteered if they had known that it was a one-way trip. They all said yes. I think that we will still be able to find enough people with The Right Stuff.
I think its more about balancing the two formats. The other one attracts newer viewers interested in scientific topics, while this one is better for people who are fairly versed. I think of them like different classes in "Sabine" school. Where some students would love to just move to the next one and forget the previous one, some students even though in the next class still enjoy the lectures from the previous.
No useless visual effects? Did you even watch this video? I can hardly think of a more annoying and useless visual effect than those horribly outdated axial jump cuts twice a minute in this video clip.
@@savagex1322 Good point. I suck at marketing, and you are probably right: she needs to optimize for both "new school" and "old school" audiences. Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
@@GntlTch But fine Mars dust will be relentlessly trying to get into every habitat, vehicle and pressure suit (and from there into lungs and then into graves). Particularly as equipment has to go out and come back in. Can it be combatted to some extent? Yes, but it will waste vast quantities of precious water, volume, mechanical equipment and time and never be completely successful. Of course, you should think of all that instantly from my comment without me having to explain it to you.
I used to live in Kansas. It is green and clean, and I truly miss it. I now live in Southern NV. There are areas here that look very much like Mars. I used to play a game with my brother. I would send him a photo of Mars and ask him, Las Vegas or Mars? Then I would find an area covered with red rock and devoid of vegetation, and ask, Las Vegas or Mars? Sometimes he would not be sure which, as long as the blue sky wasn't in the photo. He lives in Iowa. For us, Iowa and Kansas may not be Mars, but there's no place like home. I suspect that the early residents of Mars will have a strong longing for a pair of red heels they can click together to get back home to Kansas. I often have that wish even in Nevada.😂
Every dinosaurus, every extinct animal or plant that ever lived is cheering on our space exploration efforts. The essence of life is to spread, not to limit itself. If we are the only planet with life we have the duty to spread life to other planets. Yes, protect Earth. But also spread outside. These are not mutually exclusive and everybody knows that. We, unlike millions of species before us have the chance. Because we can, we should.
Animals are cheering? I have yet to observe any animal "cheer" for any reason whatsoever. To offer one's approval for anything is an intellectual act and requires the faculty of WILL, something only humans have: intellect and will. So your "animals cheering" is a flaccid fantasy, at best.
For sure, we are likely the first species that can even think about the wider universe, humanity is hardly perfect, but with all that we have achieved, we will spread life across the universe! (Tho we should probably fix our mess on earth first, Atleast the Fuel is running out, so we'll go green regardless) And cheer up Owen & Aksel, persue your passion , Listen to your doupts & prove them wrong!
1:54 Richard Dawkins is looking more and more like a 'Thunderbirds' puppet by the year, and behaving like one too. I used to admire him, but now I just see him as a clown.
People started building cathedrals in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be finished for generations. With modern technology we can duplicate those efforts in five years or less. Consider the reconstruction of Notre Dame after the fire. Yes it will probably be cheaper and easier to get to Mars in the future, but that is no reason to abandon attempts to get there now. With that kind of attitude human progress will just stall and fail.
We started agriculture knowing it would take several thousand years to come to fruition. And it took 12,000 years for us to get back to the same nutritional level as pre-agricultural cultures. Humans had already been doing selective breeding for a long time (earliest wolf domestication likely started 45,000 years ago). We knew it would be hard and take an eternity. If we can start a project like that when we only had 4 million people on they planet, we can certainly start going to Mars as soon as possible. Especially when agriculture effectively cost them like 90% of their GDP, and it'll never go past 1% for us.
I see most people here miss the point of a Mars colony. Don't think about it as an escape from planet Earth, but a steppingstone to expanding human presence in the cosmos. Terraforming Mars (and Venus) can be an experiment in geoengineering, one that is more controlled and deliberate than what we're doing now an Earth. It can be a learning experience to safely develop techniques that we would then use safely on Earth. If we look a bit further than the immediate future, the universe has given us two worlds that we can use as steppingstones to expand human presence in the cosmos: Mars and Venus. Sure terraforming would take hundreds of years, but it is possible. Furthermore, developing the capability to transport humans to Mars gives us more flexibility when dealing with cosmic threats to our own world: such as asteroid or comet strikes. And here there's one point worth mentioning: while the asteroid threat is pretty well understood at this point, people usually underestimate the threat from comets and extrasolar rocks: we find new ones every year and with current technology we'd have a few months warning at best if spotted a threatening one and very little we could do to stop it. A self-sustaining Mars colony would ensure the survival of the human species in case of a civilization ending comet strike on Earth, or in case of nuclear war, which is an ever-increasing threat these days. And while it is easier to fix the climate of Earth than terraforming Mars, the same can't be said about convincing all the powers on Earth to give up their nuclear weapons. It has been tried. It has failed. But, Musk is also wrong in saying that colonizing Mars would guarantee the future of consciousness: there are possible cosmic events that can wipe out life on a solar system wide scale; to truly guarantee the future of consciousness we have to go even further and colonize other star systems. ... and he's also wrong in using methane to get off Earth. The booster for starship should be hydrogen powered. Using Methan on the scale he's proposing is a huge contribution to climate change.
In disaster recovery planning, there's a concept - I don't remember the term offhand - that whatever disaster you're preparing for should not take out the backups when it takes out your primary infrastructure. So, if you're in Silicon Valley and you're planning your disaster recovery around an earthquake, you don't want your backup to be anywhere near the Cascadia subduction zone, because if the Cascadia fault slips, it'll likely take out your primary as well as your backup. Better to put your backup in, say, North Dakota. If you're in Florida and your anticipated disaster is a hurricane, don't put the backup in Texas or Louisiana or along the East Coast; put it in Arizona. If you're in Toronto and your disaster is a blizzard, put your backup in Vancouver, not in New Brunswick. And so on. There aren't many things that can wipe out humanity as a species. An asteroid strike. Nuclear war. Chemical or biological weapons. Grey goo. A gamma ray burst. A supervolcano. I'm sure there are a few others. We're widely distributed enough on the planet that even most of those might be survivable, albeit with a vastly reduced population. But any conceivable backup that's on the same planet will probably be almost as vulnerable to those as our main civilization is. That's the appeal of going to Mars. The vast majority of the things powerful enough to wipe us off of this planet are not going to wipe us off of Mars, if we can get a Martian colony to the point of being self-sustaining. It's no different than an off-site backup, or how someone in the presidential or royal line of succession is always kept away from the others.
Mars is so hostile to life that it doesn't even have unicellular organisms. I think any humans unfortunate enough to live and work on Mars would struggle daily to survive, let alone thrive (reproduce and raise children). What good is an offworld colony as a backup of humanity when they can't grow as a population? As someone who raises my own crops, even doing that on Earth in a geographic area conducive to food staples is much harder than a lot of people think.
@@judgejudyandexecutioner If you haven't noticed, the universe is hostile to life. That is why it is not smart to put all of humanities' eggs all in one basket. The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! - Larry Niven
Possibly the greatest threat to humanity's survival is------ humanity itself. If we go to mars, we'll be taking the seeds of our further demise with us.
I think artificial space colonies like the O'Neil Cylinders, Ringworlds, etc. are far more feasible economically and don't take hundreds of years, unlike terraforming Mars. I think planets are better off being mined than living in. As mentioned here, it's unlikely that anyone will WANT to actually live in these planets, considering how harsh the conditions are.
Venus at least has decent gravity, atmospheric pressue and sunshine if one would ever manage to build some kind of floating cities above the deadzone. The ice moons might at least have plenty of water and thermal springs (which also means oxygen and hydrogen) if we could drill through the ice. Mars is honestly just Moon but further away. The atmosphere is so pityful it barely counts, only energy source is nuclear. Minerals? Might as well mine in the asteroid belt at that point.
@@Alias_Anybody Every version of anywhere in the solar system is hell compared to anyplace on Earth. Antarctica and the Sahara are thousands of times more livable than any place in space. Until we can master people living in the ISS, we're not ready for Mars or anywhere else. ISS astronauts can't be up there for more than about a year. Until we extend that to 80, we can't go anywhere.
You can’t build those without a massive amount of material. Which is part of the reason to go to mars, you can build a space elevator there so it actually makes building mega space stations possible once you have a space elevator from mars.
I remember attending a lecture about Mars colonisation in 2013 and bringing up the lack of magnetosphere and also the low gravity (which would cause bone deformities and muscle mass loss for long-term inhabitants) and a professor casually dismissing these concerns because "they'll come up with something." It was incredible to see a PhD in astrophysics get so caught up with hype. For context, I am not a scientist and thought my objections were based in high school level science.
They are based in high school science and you're right. There's no practical consideration that going to Mars would work. We don't know nearly enough about the requirements humans need to live to take them off-planet for any amount of time. We can't even keep astronauts on the ISS in good health long-term and they experience 90% of Earth's gravity and have all the oxygen, food and water they need.
The low gravity problem are worse on the moon or in any current tech space station so not a particularly strong argument against mars. If anything it the biggest argument for it as it’s the highest gravity level we can reasonably come by that isn’t earth. The proximity to the asteroid belt is also a huge draw.
Yes, partly because it has higher gravity, but mainly because it has large quantities of water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. It also has a day/night cycle almost identical to Earth
Yes and no. Yes, it has a day/night cycle similar to earth, it's gravity is higher than earth like previous reply pointed. Higher gravity allows an atmosphere where, as moon has virtually no atmosphere. Mars seems to have ice on its pole. If it is ice water, it could solve a huge problem for potential civilization. No, because it's far away from earth, and to get there, it's a few months of journey, but the moon is just a couple of days away. When it comes to being protected from solar radiation, it is a pretty much similar approach. In my opinion, if we just want a civilization that is outside of our planet moon is easier compared to Mars in terms of transportation time and cost it takes and also if the new civilization needs an emergency evacuation or something similar. But if we are talking about what if something happens to earth, like a meteor strike that has the power to wipe out everything, then the moon is also not much safer since how close it is relative to earth.
@@anthonybrett Imagine what we'll invent just trying to live permanently on the Moon. Your comment is also not really relevant regarding practically of where humans should settle.
its more of a challenge. Take some samples. Take some happy snaps. And bugger off back to Earth. There is a point in reaching Mars. There is no point in living there long term.
Whether or not the current efforts succeed in putting a human colony on Mars, it should be understood that, if humans succeed in the future at becoming a multi-planet, or even a space faring species, that journey ultimately began with Elons efforts. Before SpaceX it was as if we took for granted an assumed guarantee that we would eventually get around to settling other planets, as if that was just a given logical progression for us and the ability to do so would just fall onto our laps when the time was right. Except, in reality, we were actually slowly becoming disaffected with our excitement towards space being the next frontier for humanity. I think Elon deserves a lot of credit for getting people excited about space again, because it it really brings out the better side of humanity when we're reminded that we're all on the same side. There's some really major moments for humanity out there. Landing people on another planet, setting up a permanent structure on the moon or Mars, finding microbial life and realizing that, at least on some level, we aren't alone in the universe. Those are the kinds of moments that gets everyone all on the same side. Maybe Elon won't succeed in building a colony on Mars, but it will be because of the efforts from everyone at SpaceX that we'll have a greater understanding of the problems that we'll need to overcome. That's the whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants.
Whilst living on Mars is at present an absurd idea, it is providing motivation for the Starship which will massively reduce the cost of sending payloads into orbit, and hence it will be a major contribution to space development. The moon will surely become a mining and manufacturing base, thanks to Starship and lookalikes. As for expensive things always being led by nation states, well the conquest of India by the British was led by private industry, as was the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Development of semiconductors was essentially privately funded, their production costs a fortune. Starship itself would be very expensive were it lead by government. Instead Musk is developing a new super rocket for much less than the SLS system that is government financed. The SLS cost more than two billion dollars per launch, Starship should cost 1/10 of that, if not much less. Very expensive things can be done privately if there is a sufficient return on investment.
"Very expensive things can be done privately if there is a sufficient return on investment." But that's very much the point. To my understanding, there is absolutely no money to make going to mars (contrary to inventing the transistor or conquering India). So why would people invest large amounts on that ?
Why is living on Mars absurd? People do things others consider obsurd literally all the time. YOU not liking it doesn't mean a thing on the grand scale. Everyone thinks their personal perspective is everything.
@ There is as good as no air, so you’ll need a source of oxygen at least. Water is present but buried deep and must be mined and purified. No atmosphere means no open fields, so plants and animals must be housed in giant shed with glass roofs or roof lights. Thus the cost of food will be extremely high. The cost of buildings will be high as they must be airtight. The overall cost of a self sustaining colony would be massive with no revenue generation. And we have never constructed a successful long term sealed environment. Hence the idea is currently absurd.
Instead of trying to go to an uninhabitable planet (at an evolutionary stage where it's not feasible to do so) Musk should concentrate on research and development of asteroid detection and deflection and improving environment protection. Take care that AI dev stays safe. Be a good employer. Maybe even do something good for global politics by being a good advisor to Trump. There's a lot you could do with dozens of billions of dollars.
I love how, for certain individuals, the idea of changing an entire planet atmosphere from basically 0 is more credible than us having an impact on our own climate.
Excellent point. And shows the degree to which fantastical Hollywood sci-fi movie plot thinking is being mistaken for actual science.
Terraforming is as likely as cold fusion. Cold Fusion might have an advantage.
Very few people looking at going to Mars today are interested in terraforming. As Sabine mentioned, terraforming is probably something for consideration a few centuries from now and I think she is correct.
Additionally, many people interested in Mars, such as Musk, are also very concerned about climate change on Earth. These two interests stem from the same fundamental concern, which is long term survival of the species. We want both Earth and Mars to have a thriving population, not just one or the other, so maintaing a healthy planet is very important in addition to occupying Mars. Case in point, Musk has long been very focused on making EVs and Solar panels through Tesla in an explicit attempt to help decarbonization efforts.
Edit: I may have originally misinterpreted your post, as I believe you are highlighting the role of climate denial, which is also crazy to me that it still exists. I'll keep the above response still for the discussion.
"We often get up in our daily lives (mainly because Tesla doesn't pay enough, and wont unionize) but why not think long-term and strive for a million year civilization? no a 100-million year civilization, i mean a gazillion year civilization. just give me your money." -honest lonny musk
@@jeremiahcutright81 You said: "Musk . . . . very concerned about climate change on Earth. These two interests stem from the same fundamental concern, which is long term survival of the species."
Musk is just cranking everyone with Hollywood doomsday sci-fi plots. But it is NOT first principals science.
Unmitigated climate change is NOT an extinction level event. Neither is nuclear war. They would destroy modern civilization, yes but NOT THE SAME as extinction to the last person and should not be conflated. (But Musk conflates them all the time. Notice the emotional effect as emotions shut down reason.)
Runaway green house effect, as on Venus, is not possible on Earth. As civilization collapses there would still be habitable regions at higher latitudes. Loss of population and industrialization would then self-limit further GHGs from human sources. Left to it's own devices the biosphere would eventually find a new equilibrium.
As far as nuclear war, critical studies show even in all out nuclear war 1% of humanity or 90 million people still survive in remote regions, Southern Hemisphere and government bunkers. That's 90 million people with knowledge of modern science to rebuild. Compare with evolutionary bottleneck in our pre-history where a few thousand proto-humans went on to set the stage for modern civilization from only stone age technology.
BTW, malicious AI easily follows humans to Mars so a Mars colony wouldn't help us much their either.
Best quote of the day pertaining to Mars settlers: "Some of them will die in novel ways."
'Sign up here if you want to die in a novel way!'
Technically he'll be shooting the largest load in history so there's bound to be some fallout.
Unlike on Earth where they'll die in traditional ways in the millions. Like in wars.
We all die on Earth in Novel ways
@ramdas363 one day there will be a war on mars
I'm a South African, and just looking at how empty Africa is because of deserts tells me that before we go away to hard to breathe places we can just make these deserts liveable. It's massive spaces.
no shit or Australia. terraform Australia. but Musk in a bad person and I hope he is first to go
Once we fill up all the empty spaces we'll be back to where we are now - in a far more crowded and degraded planet. We have to look to the solar system, though Mars is a particularly unappealing option. The moon, then O'Neill cylinders are fairly clearly the way ahead.
@@smithjarrod3935
Musk may have his faults, but his defence of free speech puts him firmly on the side of the angels.
@@harpo345 He just admitted he was restricting accounts that were criticizing his opinions, so please, do not make him a free speech angel...
@@wojtek1582
I didn't say he was an angel, I said he was on the side of the angels and also said he had his faults. However, give me Musk any day rather than the frighteningly corrupt and authoritarian leaders with their boots on our necks.
I remember Musk saying in 2017 that by 2024 he will build a colony on mars.
It's "back to the future" a la Elon Musk !
Musk is a con. There's a reason he doesn't want to go to the moon first. It's because we've been 56 years ago! After 23 years, SpaceX still hasn't come close to achieving what NASA did in the late 60s and they probably won't for years or even decades. That's why Elon prefers referring to Mars instead, to avoid the comparison. SpaceX would look like losers if the goal was the moon. Same reason why he now claims Tesla will resolve AGI. They are ten years behind Google when it comes to self driving cars. Elon is promising in six months what he won't be able to deliver in his lifetime.
It's simple to generate a breathable atmosphere on Mars: you might remember Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated this at the end of Total Recall (1990).
You just find an ancient alien installation, press your hand on the sensor, and voilà!
Haha, one of a few Arni movies that I really like.
Most violinists would eagerly - almost - agree
😆
Citation needed…
After rolling around with Sharon Stone in that workout gear, I could do anything!! ...well, after a quick nap...
When william shatner went to space he said this: "The beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound (...) The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness."
Homesick?
@@MottiShneor That's how Major Tom felt, anyway...
is he less of a rotten bastard now?
The "problem" that Dr. Hossenfelder mentioned at 13:00 is not "in her face," it is *_in her imagination._* Well, the "change" part is true, but the "problem" (or "crisis" or "emergency") isn't. The scientific evidence compellingly shows that the "change" is modest and benign, and the proven *benefits* greatly exceed the hypothetical problems.
why not overwhelming joy?
the average temperature on Mars is -81°F (-60°C), but temperatures can range from -225°F (-153°C) to 70°F (20°C)................machines barely work in antarctica btw.
You need to look at the difference between temperature and heat transfer. With the Earth's thick atmosphere (and all the water flying around), it's harder to stay warm at the South Pole than in Mars' colder but tenuous atmosphere.
Temperature is not the only issue to consider. The rate of heat transfer is also important. The thin atmosphere of Mars will not transfer the heat energy from items that quickly. Unless it is windy….
Lunar colonies first.
I am under the impression that Musk bought a tunnel boring company to build underground living facilities. Deep tunnels would use the surface rock to shield from solar wind irradiation, to contain air with minimal need for airtight sealing barriers, and also to moderate the extreme surface temperature swings.
One challenge is how to make concrete-like wall segments for these tunnels on Mars with minimal water. Sending concrete from earth would be prohibitively expensive. Apparently there have been experiments to try making concrete from Mars regolith mixed with human blood. With a small nuclear reactor they could melt and fuse Mars rock directly into wall segments.
Very quickly your taxes funneled to people leaving your country to another planet will be refused.
the lack of interest in fixing earth might actually pose a much greater and immediate threat to our species than not colonizing other planets.
it would be much easier to fix earth than to fix a planet with no atmosphere.
The thrill of living on Mars is envisioned in Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," where life is so grim a powerful hallucinogen is used to give colonists a reason to live.
That's not Mars, That's Buffalo NY.
Elon's ketamine guy will make a killing! (literally).
What a silly argument. People live in submarines, in frigid wastelands and underground for extended periods and do just fine.
I'll go if there's Perky Pat.
@@PoopyBozo-n1i Lol, sounds amazing can't wait...
Going to Mars and colonizing Mars are two different things!
Yes, we will be like the Vikings reaching America, not the Dutch founding New York. It may take 1000 years for New New York to appear on Mars.
No shit Sherlock!
Going to Mars and colonizing the moon are the same thing.
@@RobardoHughes So, we've colonized the moon? When did that happen?
@@andrew3203 Just like there are cities on the vastly less hostile, far closer continent of Antarctica. Oh...wait!
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact, it's cold as hell.
Adding this link since apparently a lot of people have never heard of Rocket Man
ua-cam.com/video/GELJ7QhRT20/v-deo.html
Tell that to 'Rocket Man' Musk.
I see what you did there..
And there's no one there to raise them if you did
@@andrewwilks2700
It’s up to 70° during summer days .
If I was younger, I would gladly raise my kids there. And I'll encourage and support my grandkids if they choose to go. Despite the risks.
Here's the most important question: WHY MARS???
We have a perfectly good Moon that's 100 times more useful and practical. Let's build stuff on the moon first! Like a space port, launch sites for future missions, science labs, observatories, a space shipyard, some factories to move the industry off planet... I find it really bizarre that the billionaires aren't competing for the Moon. It's the most obvious and most sensible first step in establishing our permanent presence outside Earth. We could go to Mars at some point in the future and do stuff there, but I think that focusing on it right now is a mistake.
A major asteroid impact on Earth would send ejecta flying into space at hypersonic speeds. Any civilisation on the Moon would likely be destroyed since I presume you'd want your civilisation facing Earth for communications purposes. Certainly if the Moon had an atmosphere with oxygen even the Far Side would not be safe.
You didn't watch the vid did you. She addressed that. So no point in me hashing it over
@@woodybrison She didn't deal with that point. Where did she deal with it? Give me a timestamp. She made some general comments but did not specifically reference the risk to a lunar colony which is what I address. The video is full of inaccuracies, misleading statements and unevidenced assertions. Just to take one example she says there is water at the poles on Mars without explaining that there is water present at numerous locations on the planet, even in equatorial regions. Her understanding of economics is weak. She seems to think that Mars and Earth are a zero sum game where anything done on Mars is a loss to Earth. Tell that to Silicon Valley, which got its start in life mainly through the space industry including the lunar landing programme. Also, Musk is not saying Mars can't have a great unsubsidised economy, he's talking about the initial capital investment.
@@owenlouisdavid ua-cam.com/video/8HNgIJqeyDw/v-deo.htmlsi=i6Iw3bijpdACmop7&t=870
If the moon turns you on then go for it. Me? I'm for Mars simply because it is a different world filled with challenges. When I'm there discovering new and exciting things I'll think of you being bored on the moon.
„If you want to spend your days wondering „Why am I here?“, maybe Kansas is enough“ 😁😁😁 Made my day, Sabine, thank you! 🙌
I'm from Topeka. She's not wrong.
Douglas Adams said "42" is the answer, maybe he was right.
Hahaha
She has such a wonderful droll sense of humor.
@@robertreeder7056 Mars is way bigger than Kansas!
Greetings, from Topeka, KS. I'm happy to confirm it is, in fact, slightly more habitable than mars.
Newton and Wichita Kansas bring back a lot of memories.
I thought Topeka is somewhere in Alaska north of arctic circle.
As a person born in north west Iowa i concur. 😊
Ah....but is it famous for its bars?
They really pay 50,000 USD to live there?
I think it's a brilliant idea! What he needs to do is take all the most important people in the world and have them colonise mars. Politicians, billionaires, social media influencers, CEOs of major corporations, etc. They could all start a super society on Mars. Don't worry about those of us left behind, we'll bumble through somehow.
Made me smile, Thanks
Thank you. Your words have inspired my thoughts.
You named the exact sort who do not need to be involved in such an effort. They regularly create all sorts of problems here on this planet well after the creation of society and laws.
@@theduder2617 I think that's his point. Get them off this planet.
That would solve all our problems lol great idea
Thanks!
I am at a loss as to why The Moon is not a given. Caves and built shelters and supporting supplies are so much easier. That should be done RIGHT now.
The whole point is to create a self-sufficient population, not yet another Amundsen-Scott station.
Yes, I think it's very likely that we'll see some habitats on the moon in the next decades. But there are space agencies working on that already, so no need for Musk to do it. The issue with the moon is though that (leaving aside the nuke issue) that it's just too small to ever hold an atmosphere.
@@SabineHossenfelder”There are space agencies doing that, so no need…” is EXACTLY the problem.
@@dvv18 no the whole point is to milk tax payer money
@@SabineHossenfelder why should we bother with the moon even? why can't we just pretend all the inhabitable parts of earth now, is the moon or mars or whatever. We just have to pretend the atmosphere is not breathable. Then when earth actually becomes uninhabitable, we don't have to move to a different planet.
Sadly, humans are not great at solving problems that can be postponed. Having a goal can be a means in itself.
It makes a lot of sense to not solve problems that aren't immediate.
@@CurtOntheRadio it's also easy to not realise the actual urgency of something until it's too late.
Name another being better at solving problems than humans
Having a goal can be a means to achieve what?
@@mikejfranklin7000a goal.
As a practice run they could terraform the Sahara desert. Plenty of oxygen, relatively easy to supply with food and water (compared to Mars), and protected from harmful radiation.
However difficult it would be to terraform the Sahara, Mars would be many, many times harder. If we can't terraform the Sahara, there is simply no way we can do Mars.
Edited to add this: I only mentioned the Sahara as a comparator of difficulty of terraforming Mars. I am well aware there are a raft of problems associated with terraforming the Sahara that have nothing to do with the terraforming itself.
I admit it was my mistake. I should have known that tongue-in-cheek does not translate to the written word. Having said that. I will not reply to any more comments telling me how bad terraforming the Sahara would be.
Terraforming the sahara, that sounds like a brilliant idea. But would the countries involved consent to it? Would that disrupt some sort of equilibrium already there. Where would the water come from to realize it. Solarpowered desalination of ocean water maybe.
@@peskyfervid6515 terraforming the Sahara desert is trivial most of it is under sea level so a couple hundred mile on Canal from the Mediterranean will fill it with water and transform it back to the temperate region. It was 10,000 years ago. But it’s also a tiny fraction of the size of Mars. It doesn’t offer the benefits of expanding humanity to other planets. Terraforming Mars will be very hard and it’s not something that we have the resources for anytime soon, but it will start within the next hundred years and probably be successfully completed within a few hundred years after that. Humanities destiny is to move out into the solar system where there’s space for trillions of people to live and unlimited power from 24 hour sore. We will build Dyson swarms with giant solar collectors over the next few thousand years.
The Sahara is not a closed system. We could radically change the environment there for sure, but not without knock on effects that people would not like.
the reason people want to start over at new planet is due to politic, you want to open a settlement on sahara where nearby country are hostile is just pure stupid, the settlement would be ravaged and the settlers would be killed and raped by militia there
The Sahara used to be a huge lake/ocean, and the nutrients from that get blown south to fertilize the rest of Africa. You would create a new barren area in Africa if you tried to terraform it
If you look out the window you only see red, forever, whereas on the ISS you gain a new perspective of the world that you have spent your entire existence looking at from one angle. Living on mars would be like a never ending covid lockdown.
Except it's worse because no stable internet connection and horrid latency.
@@AleksoLaĈevalo999 True, and even if there was internet imagine the ping between two planets.
"if you want to spend your days wondering 'why am I here?', maybe Kansas is good enough" - instant subscribe
I'm saying that about NY city!!
@@charlesflinnill978 I'm saying that for the whole of America !
-I would love to have the money to be able to go to Mars.
-Why do you want to go to Mars?
-No... I just want the money.
That's exactly the subtext here.
Maybe there's a reason why all those aliens don't already live on Mars...
That's the plan. Musk is offering any corrupt government that wants to join in his laundry.
I don't think you have the slightest grasp of this discussion...
Like it. I'm actually saving up, have been for years. I'm pretty sure the Wife will love it. I want it to be a surprise though.
There will always be problems on earth. We should never stop exploring. We can work on both at the same time
Agreed. But Mars could - if all goes well - prove to be a good example for Earth. This isn't such an odd idea. Leaving aside the immoral aspects of imperialism, the European colonies in places like the US, Australia and New Zealand did actually pioneer female rights and progressive employment policies and set a new standard.
The problem is science only matters if it can be weaponized or profitable.
@@owenlouisdavid 1) our current technology isnt good enough, remember, Mars has little atmosphere because it doesnt have a magnetosphere, and it doesnt have that because THE CORE IS FROZEN COLD. 2)the cost is prohibitive to bring people into space, much more to another planet.
@@owenlouisdavid Despite the relentless campaign of vilification, the British Empire was the VERY BEST Example of a "Civilising Empire" that -- actually -- brought MORE progress and development than it "assett-Stripped". (Compare with the utterly rapacious Spanish and Belgian Empires, for example)!
@@robjohnston1433 No, trade would have just as well brought the developments without as much exploitation. It's incredibly ignorant to assume that other nations couldn't have developed further without British inference. The British deserve all the vilification for their misdeeds which solely to exploit, as does any nation for whatever is in it's past that it might otherwise claim to be against.
i just think we need to cure cancer first before we worry about moving to Mars.
We have cured cancer long time ago. It is called fasting.
Talking about going to and terraforming mars while we have two people stuck on the international space station is wild to me.
why does the government refuse to fire boeing? who was the idiot that gave boeing the contract? they arent stuck, the government just finds itself totally unable to admit that using boeing was really really stupid. they can be brought down any day they are willing to admit that fact.
You just named the difference between Musk and other people. Between SpaceX and Boeing. People using SpaceX don't have such problems.
they arent stuck, the politicians are just unwilling to admit it was a really reaLLY REALLY STUPID IDEA TO GIVE THE CONTRACT TO BOEING.
They are not stuck. NASA decided that instead of paying for special rescue flight by SpX they would rather have Suni and Butch stay on ISS and do research while NASA reshuffles schedule of future crews to have seats to bring them down "for free"
@@Bambarbia2447 Can't rescue someone if there is no reason for a rescue.
There is nothing more seductive than working on a problem you don’t have.
humans have had the ability to destroy human life on earth for the last 70 years or so. Thats a serious problem. All it takes is a mad dictator on his death bed to start a nuclear war.
Especially when the tax payers pay for it all
Best comment. Quite weird that some poeple on this channel envy scientists the few thousand dollars they get as a salary for working on particle physics, but at the same time think that wasting trillions of dollars on a useless project of colonizing mars or the moon is a good idea.
Except it is a real problem. Some people never learned anything in science class. A world ending event isn't an if, it is a when. If we don't get off this planet humanity will end. The facts are crystal clear. Some of us care about our children and the future. Some of us only care about the Kardashians.
@@billtwok6864it’s a long term problem. We absolutely do not have the technology to make it work. Maybe in 50-100 years. I assume you will be one of the first to volunteer to go lol
I am all for sending Elon Musk to Mars.
Why? He's the only one out there doing anything. Let us guess, Orange man bad right? Sheesh
Let him take his buddy Donald who will know how to talk to the Martians who show up to greet them. Lots of loose rock for building border walls, too.
But Trump and Pootin have to go with him. Earth might have a future if that happens, but otherwise we are basically toast.
Came here for this comment. Funny how "leaders" are loose and fast with volunteers to space and soldiers to war, yet they're never on those frontlines, themselves. Hmm.
@@marktwain368 You're insulting Martians.
Something to talk about yes. We need a series of technological breakthrough. Let me give an example ; For comparison, building a space habitat large enough to call it a city is far easier than terraforming Mars.
True and building a small base using inflatables or easy-assembly habs is a lot easier than building a city.
yeah sad that acknowledgement is not popular... since its already hanging there.
I am all for it, would love to see a habitat like that. And in the far future we could have them closer to Jupiter and Saturn, so many moons, so many possibilities.
@@anafreitas1646 so many radiation....
the problem with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, at least the large ones which are closer in, is the strong magnetic field of those worlds. Radiation is also a problem on Mars, but not unsurmountable, o Jupiter's moons, you'd be dead in days.
For starters, ask yourself the following about living on Mars: "Would I trust that politicians to continue to fund me when the shine wears off? Do I believe that war, financial crisis, or similar will never interfere with the supplies to Mars? Will billionaires funding me on Mars never go bankrupt and will put my life / welfare ahead of their own interests? Are all the support systems going to remain intact until we are self-sufficient in 300 to 800 years?"
There will be war, financial crisis and similar on Mars too. The clue is: humans will be there.
I read a sci fi book decades ago where that happened. The first mission to another star - they were barely a few years into the journey when Nasa was de-funded. The mission relied on a laser powered by the sun and some really big lenses. Years later, when the political climate changed, they had to scramble to salvage the mission.
In short, do I think this is more likely to end like when the Vikings tried to colonize North America, than when the British colonized North America?
The idea is that the Mars colony would eventually be self sufficient. If it isn't it can't serve its stated purpose. Of course, we'd have to actually have the technology and resources to make that happen, and how long that will take is difficult to say.
@@PHIplaytesting E VEN CHOO AH LEE! Sorry, I couldn't help but think of Manuel of Fawlty Towers. Yes, we all get that. His question was, will that be soon enough? The first Virginia Colonists all died or disappeared before their next supply ship eventually arrived, on time, but too late.
The problem with AI as an existential threat is that robots love to go to space. Even if you flee to Mars, your toaster will chase you down.
😂
Why would they chase us though? Let's say you are an evil AI that wants to grow. All you need is materials and energy, and both can be found in space.
Mine a few rare earth asteroids and deploy your solar panels, space is comfy for them
Except when Hollywood plot armor says they somehow can't lol.
That is true.
@@frasercain Tesla are decades behind in technology, AI doesn't exist yet!
A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!
One ticket to Mars cost much less than one returning you to Earth. That's a given without a second thought.
Nobody got your Blade Runner reference.
@@craigwall9536 A witty thing to do would have been adding to it, but I can't do that now, because you spoilt it.
@@terrylandess6072 Return to earth would be essentially free- rolled into the cost of going to Mars. Empty ships would be constantly going back to get more materials and colonists. That's the plan at least.
@@alanbeaumont4848 you're welcome.
Danke!
What's all the buzz about Mars? If we wanted to go somewhere red and inhospitable to life, there's loads of room left in Australia which is like 5 times closer.
5 times closer 😂
I think the idea behind this is to make us a multi-planetary species, so an extinction event on one planet won't be the end of humanity.
😂😂😂😂🙃🙃👍👍
And it's fully covered by the nuclear umbrella.
sod off, there is no room here. My neighbours being 100km away is close enough thank you!
I think we need to do BOTH. Care for Earth and start a small population on Mars. You don't need 1 million people to protect our genes. A few thousand are enough and this could be doable with Starship. Remember that such adventures ALWAYS boost the development of new technologies: Small fusion or fission reactors; create water, oxygen and fuel from the atmosphere, adopt our genes to Mars conditions etc.
Agree completely. The goal, Elon's, is to have a totally self sustaining colony on Mars . He has stated that it might need a base population of a million. I'm thinking AI, robots, nanotechnology , etc. in the coming decades will make that number much smaller.
That colony is doomed if mothership earth no-longer exists. They may survive for a while in caves but would never thrive.
An important detail: the innovations of NASA and the moon missions were essentially public domain, with universities, researchers, and society as a whole participating and benefiting. That was the general pattern of the scientific revolution as a whole. Private companies like Musk's silo their innovations greatly limiting their spread and the extremely valuable symbioses that happen in open research, while also claiming all the benefits to themselves. To himself, in Musk's case, to do with as he pleases.
@@suisinghoraceho2403 That's why the goal is a self-sustaining colony
Can I get your dealer's number? You are clearly smoking the good stuff.
No one ever talks about the reality of living full time on Mars. It would be absolutely miserable and the smallest mishap could mean instant death. You would probably have to live underground with very little opportunity to do much of anything but work 15 hours a day. The engineered systems would have to work flawlessly, all the time, to maintain a pressurized environment.
We take for granted here on earth that if the HVAC system goes down we're merely uncomfortable, not dead in 6 minutes. Also, would it ever be self sustaining? We have no examples ever of a colony like this working long term. There is nothing Mars would have to trade with earth so it would be completely dependent on a constant stream of rockets from Earth to Mars.
Of course we may also want to factor in the global warming costs of 100s upon 100s of rocket flights to Mars and back.
You should read my book, Marsworld. You'll realise then that this is all just Stay-Put propaganda. The "smallest mishap" won't mean death. Humans will rarely be conducting spacesuit EVAs. They will mostly explore in pressurised rovers. Any EVAs will be strictly controlled. On Mars wherever you go on an EVA you'll probably have your faithful robodog with you with all the emergency equipment you need. When the HVAC goes down? The people designing the mission aren't stupid. There won't be one system and there will always be back up and emergency systems. Don't forget there will be two human passenger Starships on the surface as refuges as well.
We have examples of humans going to Mars on 11 missions and no one dying. That was with 1960s technology. Things have advanced hugely since then. Even if there were 10,000 Starship flights a year burning methane (a very clean fuel, nothing like petrol/gasoline or diesel) they would never get close to even 0.1% of all the oil, coal, and gas being burnt on planet Earth. For coal alone, 8.5 billion tonnes of coal is burnt each year. Why do Stay-Put fanatics make these spurious and unserious points?
The only thing to find on Mars are probably rare minerals needed on earth. It would be a mining colony. 1 Mio. people working as slaves without workers rights and no option to leave. The fever dream of a capitalist.
Don't forget about the mess to the human body the 1/3 earth gravity would have
@@rowleyj31 That's an assertion. Where's your proof. Until we get there, no one can know but all the evidence suggests that since people have survived for over 400 days in a Zero G and emerged in good health, 0.38 G will not be a huge health issue.
I think that people are not thinking about all the simple things they would never be able to do again: Go for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, see wildlife, hear birdsong, visit their childhood haunts, travel overseas, go skydiving, etc. etc. It would be like living in your work building 24/7. Too bad if you suddenly feel like going shopping or working on your car. I just cannot believe that people think they could cope psychologically with the deprivation with very little hope of returning to Earth. I also wonder whether some of the people arguing this have ever lived in a rural community with few resources, or in a foreign country away from their possessions and friends and family. It's surprising how quickly you start to miss things once the novelty of the new place wears off. Now, it's a bit different now with the internet and Amazon marketplace- we are less dependent on local services, but I think people are still going to miss things- even if only the local kebab shop or the local mall. Just look at some housing developments that become social wastelands because they don't develop local services. You probably won't have a choice of doctors, access to a proper legal system, most of your friends and family, or a choice of hardware stores, camera shops, careers, aged-care facilities, holiday destinations, somewhere to "get away from it all". I think some people will cope and even thrive, so I do accept that.
There is one elephant in the room that no politician mentiones, since it undermines his own position.
Mankind allways went from smaller organisation forms to more complex forms to improve living conditions, security....
From family to clan, from clan to village, from village to citystates, from citystates to realms, from realms to nations.
Our way of life has outgrown the problem solution potential of nations.
From resource usage, pollution, climate change, poverty, migration, capitalism (not in the sense of Karl Marx, but wealth accumulation by international companies)....
Nations are no longer fit to solve global issues.
Mankind needs to unite.
I think waiting for a good moment to have technology at high enough level is tricky. Often these technologies will get developed because you're doing something amibitious. If you waited instead, its possible they would never get developed in the first place.
The technologies mentioned in the video would be developed because of the massive impact they would have on life on earth. That would be why they are developed; making later space exploration easier is just a side benefit. If I got to decided where to put trillion dollars, there is a long list of earth based projects I would rather see accomplish first.
Not to mention the technologies get lost if not used. Famously, we’ve lost the tech to go to the moon even.
@@PravinDahal false. It's just that we can't build that ship anymore, because it was essentially made by artisans with tinsnips. Therefore we cannot replicate it.
So true then?
Bingo
He doesn't realize how important microbiomes are. Environmental and internal to sustain our own health. Major challenge on mars.
You are talking as though humans are not inventive. Living on Mars will have to be vastly more advanced technologically than right now. But some people are afraid even leaving their own homes, don’t take their advice.
That's not that important: just import the microbes, and fertilise any crops we grow with the right mix of bacteria. And cultivate them, give them as supplements - like Yakult, or whatever.
NOT MARS...... Focus on Kepler!
Yeah Musk doesn't realise this but you do.
@@thealmightyaku-4153 Which microbes? A randomly selected square yard of topsoil will probably contain scores, if not hundreds of mircobes as yet undescribed by science, and that's chicken feed next to what lives in the human gut.
Power and propulsion systems always come to the forefront of my mind when these topics come up.
Not just for space travel but even for local global travel.
Getting to where we want to go quickly and safely as well as transporting large amounts of cargo without needing large volumes of a fuel source is a major obstacle which really needs to be overcome before we start thinking about going so far from this ball which we are literally a part of structurally.
We are the earth and the earth is us.
A lot of people don't realize how much we are indistinguishable from the planet itself.
very nicely said
With so many UFO crashes, it appears that reactionless drive technology is not necessarily safe.
You are aware that there are, and have been, many science rovers working on Mars with just solar power. Some are still running after years of exploring.
@@terrysullivan1992 they are not running of just solar power, the new rovers are using RTGs
We are part of earth, but earth certainly will go on long after humans have destroyed themselves.
About 50 years ago the Space Studies Institute of Princeton spelled out methods of creating space habitations, often using materials from the moon and placing them at locations such as Lagrange points. They would be rotating in such a way that gravity is simulated and could be done in tiers, some farther from center than others so that a variety of percentages of 1g, average earth gravity, can be achieved. Such a scheme could allow for those higher up to be used by those desiring to achieve greater strength and those lower down to be used by senior citizens to ease their mobility.
In any case keeping something close to 1g would prevent the kind of bone degeneration
The guy who gave us the Cybertruck is going to preserve consciousness for a million years. Here is some reality: In this entire (excellent) video, not one word was uttered about human physiology. Permanent presence off the Earth will be radically different from space tourism. Mars has less than forty percent of the gravity our species has evolved to live in. That altered gravity will effect each and every part of the human body, bones to retinas, not to mention all the other wrenching environmental changes aside from gravity. Not one single baby has been concieved and carried to term in altered gravity, and this guy Musk is drawing up blueprints for cities on Mars. The way to colonize space is rotating wheel or tube cities. You can adjust the gravity. The environment would be livable, and closer to Earth in case of emergency. We do not yet have materials strong enough to handle the stresses, but they are in the pipeline, and that is where the effort should be going. Space Elevator and rotating structures. Not Hyperloops on Mars!
I totally agree. Unfortunately is an aspect totally underrated. See my recent post on the topic here based on my experience in Antarctica.
Space research has provided strong evidence that humans are almost exclusively "earthlings," we are inextricably locked to the home planet.
(So too are "fish" locked to marine environments, they don't work well away from that.)
Well, it's "only" $3 billion, the US government spends that much each and every day just for the operating costs for the day.
It’s a pipe dream because Movies have made it look like a “cakewalk” however, reality is, it’s anything but! Temperature vary from -225F to 70F with an AVERAGE of -68F and remember, even at 70F there is no breathable Air, you can’t just step out and walk around etc., etc…. Get real folks!
O'Neil colonies.. How do you get excited about life when you can look straight up and see... your neighbors? Youd need walls several feet or more of dirt/rock , maybe much more to protect these space colonies from the inevitable radiation, gamma burst meteor or asteroid impacts. I don't see it. You need a planet for gravity and an atmosphere with magnetic poles to reduce radiation and burn up most of what might hit the planet. Nobody wants to live an entire life or raise a family on some space station, can't image the psychological implications of that..
gravity isn't the problem. perchlorates in the soil as well as the fact that mars has no million year future as the ionosphere is nearly completely stripped off by the sun already.
In the 1980s I was a member of the L5 Society. I think building large rotating space colonies is much more feasible than colonizing Mars. imho, one of the biggest problems colonizing Mars is that it only has 1/3 G whereas a space colony could have 1 G.
Yes, Mars is a one-way trip. Anyone born on Mars who came to Earth would be carrying two more of themselves on their shoulders. They could do nothing useful and would probably die quite soon.
large rotating space colonies are an order of magnitude more difficult than building a sttlement on land. Eventually they will be built, but not for a long time still.
Speaking of rotating space habitats why not instead of trying to terraform mars we live in rotating space habitats around mars's orbit? Only using the planet to extract resources. It makes way more sense and will take way less time.
Why not start by building a habitat in the middle of the Gobi desert? You have gravity an air, and a fraction of the travel expense. And you still get away from the rest of humanity which is a hedge against global pandemics and political strive.
@@JohnDlugosz
Antarctica would be a better test run.
No animals, no warm Sunshine … what a sad place to be .
O'Neill cylinders would be a better bet. Easier to access, better solar power and without a gravity well, a ready made industry in asteroid mining is at their doorstep.
But all the radiation you can eat
Its more like hell but in real life.
Just about every day on Mars is sunny, you get clear skies way more often than you do at most places on Earth.
no cats? then i'm not going.
Historically, we - as species - never engaged in any exploration after properly preparations, we launched ourselves into the unknown as soon as it would be possible, disregarding anything else.
From the first homo sapiens leaving Africa to Columbus navigating into America (not to mention the Vikings going to Greenland even before), the move was made as soon as technology allowed a minimal chance of success. Sometimes even sooner.
In don't think we will wait to technology to mature before trying going to Mars. I think we will try at first opportunity.
If we will succeed like Columbus, or slowly fail like the Vikings, I don't have a clue.
Some truth in what you say (though the Vikings got to America as well as Greenland). But it's also the case that exploration depends on the home culture. Think of China. In the 15th century they were sending huge naval expeditions into the unknown. And then, suddenly, there was a change of Imperial policy. The decision was made to look inward. China drew back on itself and lost interest in exploration.
This is why you have to understand what the more serious people in the Stay-Put alliance are up to. There are extremists in the Green/Red-Green movement who hate the idea of exploration, especially exploration led by a billionaire, even a billionaire who builds electric vehicles. What they are trying to do is change the culture of the home planet into one that drastically reduces humanity's impact on Earth, one that emphasises risks and dangers and one that encourages a very parochial attitude based on that you might call "ideological science".
The Darién
In 1698, Scottish banker William Paterson attempted to colonize the Darién in Panama, but the venture failed. The settlement was abandoned twice, and only a few hundred of the 2,500 Scottish settlers survived. The failure was due to poor preparation, an English trade ban, and a Spanish siege. The Darién's failure bankrupted Scotland and contributed to its unification with England in 1707.
(Gemini AI)
...and now, with the hindsight of History, it is clear that the naysayers were correct: Panama can never be colonized.
Interesting thank you.
well, then, I wish elon & usa keep their partneship on that perspective ;)
And the matter of all sorts of deadly tropical diseases
@@RobardoHughesThe question is the timing. Trying to do it prematurely would lead to our own downfall.
Not "dangerous illusion" but "dangerous delusion" (3:00). Big difference.
Yes, I was also wondering where she got “dangerous illusion” from, when he clearly said “dangerous delusion”. 🤔
ESL hiccup.
No one ever talks about mars gravity. Humans cant live there for more than a couple years at a time without wrecking their bodies that evolved at much higher gravity.
That does make survival there a bit of a stretch...
Gravity, radiation, logistical problems, architectural problems, biological problems in relation to all of the aforementioned... the idea of colonizing Mars is a laughable joke at this point in history.
Well, there have been no long term studies at 38% of Earth's gravity so you cannot make that claim. Zero gravity definitely does but that's not the same.
There are simple centrifugal ways to simulate gravity. Also don't discount adaptation and evolution. Who knows, the long-term effects of low gravity on the human brain might be the key to developing warp drives.
@@jyidorne8042 Well, at least in any meaningful way.
thanks for compiling this sabine,,
2:40 The problems here on earth are political, not technological.
Her perspective or yours?
Let’s ignore the (over) one billion people who do not have drinkable water.
@@ronaldckrausejr7762That's a very good example of a political problem.
Technological, getting drinkable water is barely an inconvenience.
@@ronaldckrausejr7762 Again: that is mostly a political problem. If people were free to buy and sell water, it would be way more available for those who need it. Turns out that politicians, especially on poor regions, put bureaucratic or legal barriers to trade. Or those regions are under wars, started by politicians.
The problems on Earth are scientifical: we don't know enough about ourselves, how to live on Earth in a durable sustainable and harmonic way. We need first to understand ourselves better, before we go messing up other places.
They're both.
Mars is so often described in media, as Sabine has done, as our 'next neighbour planet' that the fact that it is not when it comes to average distance is generally overlooked. In describing Earth's 'next neighbour planet', look no further than Venus at 188 million kms distant from the Earth. Granted, Mars with its highly elliptical orbit swings by at between 56 - 401 million kms, however on average Mars at 225 million kms from Earth is (again on average) a good 37 million kms more remote than Venus.
Think of it this way. You're living out in the country a bit, about half a mile away is a state prison. They are your nearest "neighbors". About 3/4 miles away is an old recluse with a sour disposition. To whom do your refer to others as being your neighbors?
The context is spaceflight. The journey to Mars requires less delta V than the journey to Venus.
Moreover, that's 220 Mkm of bad road. One out of three Mars probes don't survive.
@@drkjk Both?
Venus is an unmitigated hell hole.
Happy to see Sabine is promoting the work of PlanetWild
Me, too. Once a month, I get to feel good about my small contribution to the world.
@katambrose5568 ☺️
Yes. Agreed
Yes, Thank you Sabine! The endorsement and promotion by a highly respected celebrity can make a world of difference to the success of a nonprofit.
[ Uhhh, baby, baby...
it's a wild word...
and it's hard to get by,
just with a pony smile. 🎶 ]> 😎👍
Mars is a lifeboat for humans if there was a cataclysmic event on earth.
The grass is always greener...... Until you get there!
...si first rocket must carry container of w€€d, right? 😸
No grass at all. lol
Or you already smoked it.
And sometimes it's just green paint on red rocks..
Imagine never ever feeling the warmth of the sun on your skin again.
I remember reading estimates that a breathable atmosphere could be generated on Mars over a period of 100 to 300 years and that it would take 10 million to 15 million years to be stripped away. That would give any inhabitants plenty of time to develop a means of protecting that atmosphere, or they could user the same technology that generated the atmosphere to make up for losses.
Sounds like made up sci fi nonsense
Yes, very weird this wasn't mentioned in the video. Completely misleading point, if you ask me.
Idk what's going on with Sabine but she just implied that the same people who could create a thick Martian atmosphere are too stupid to prevent it from being stripped away over millenia lol I facepalmed
100 to 300 years to generate oxygen. I doubt that, where is this large amount of oxygen coming from?
Show us your science - nonsense comment.
"The Moon is our window to forever."
We'll get to Mars as well one day, but Luna is 3 days away. I mean come on...
Who said we have to choose? There is no dichotomy here, just like we can solve Earth's problems while working on space travel...
The moon is so dependent on Earth that any calamity our extremely dangerous universe could throw at it would destroy both. A colony on the moon is leaving life's eggs in the same basket.
Dust. Research lunar dust (regolith) and how the absolute lack of erosion means jagged sharp dust clinging to everything and destroying it.
@@jackprier7727 Your wet blanketry borders on the religious. Your type would have never left the metaphorical cave.
Living under oceans would be cheaper, easier and can accommodate more people, O2 and water is also more plentiful
I think one of the minor points made in the fictional world of "The Expanse" - is that humans don't have the thousand-year stick-to-it-iveness to get Mars terraforming done, even after a major colony is established.
Sabine, I enjoy your videos! They add a realistic scientific viewpoint to the issues facing us. Personally, as a geological engineer, I am quite aware that we are living on the golden age of the planet. We are mining minerals and energy (coal, oil, gas, wood) and we can not expect them to be replaced. Recycling is not 100% efficient (think greater entropy) and we are quickly disseminating valuable and critical elements. Our current society is dependent on many elements such as rare earths, copper, aluminum etc. These will become too expensive to extract and then the technologies will begin to wither and we will go back in time. 1000 years from now we will be Stone Age again ( or worse) and there will be no returning as the resources will not be concentrated enough for Stone Age man to take advantage of. Depressing? Yes.
I appreciate your insights @keithbrown, and I completely agree that we are indeed living in a critical moment regarding resource management. The reality is that our planet's resources are finite, and we are rapidly approaching a point where they will become increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. With Earth Overshoot Day occurring earlier each year-this time on August 1, 2024-we're consuming resources at a rate that exceeds what the Earth can regenerate in a year. This unsustainable trajectory suggests that if we don't start exploring alternative sources of materials, such as those found on Mars or asteroids, we may find ourselves in a dire situation where essential elements become too costly or even impossible to obtain. Opening up new frontiers for resource extraction beyond Earth is not just a luxury; it's a necessity for the survival of future generations. By investing in space exploration and the potential colonization of Mars, we can tap into vast resources that could alleviate some of the pressure on our planet's ecosystem. Waiting for better technology to arrive could mean missing the window of opportunity to act. Just like how we can't afford to ignore the depletion of rare earth elements and other critical materials here on Earth, we also cannot afford to delay our efforts to secure resources from other celestial bodies. The time to act is now; otherwise, we risk returning to a much less advanced state as our current technologies falter due to resource scarcity.
You could add fresh water, soil, and phosphorous to your list of consumables. Not going to find that on Mars.
It would make more sense to try mining on the moon before colonizing Mars.
All this depends on whether we grow up as a so called "civilisation". It's not looking good so far.
My best guess is a future that is mixed low-tech with some enduring electronics. That is, if humanity doesn't go extinct by its own folly. Sky scrapers and ships could be mined for metal to make hand tools for a smaller population 100+ years from now.
We will *never* sort out the problems we have on Earth.
I don't think anyone suggested we would. But there's no benefit to trying to escape Earth to escape problems. The problems are human caused - they will follow us anywhere we go. If we're going to Mars, it wouldn't be to escape climate change or nuclear winter - those are coming with us as they're human problems.
Exactly. Best thing settlers did was get out of corrupt Europe and get into America.
@@TimJSwan Right, to corrupt America.
We managed to beat diseases. We brought illiteracy to a minimum. We learned how to feed the whole world. We created systems to share discoveries instantly.
We are solving many problems.
Well i wouldnt say never, Like @m0n0deferia mentioned, all those things are fairly recent historywise,
& in our lifetime we've seen computers go from fridge size to fitting in our pocket.
Dont get lost in doupt, consider the negatives & the positives, look at the whole picture we can see the current problems but plenty others we have solved
5:09 "gathering resources ", elon speak for use the usa as an atm for HIS Mars plan. We pay. I won't be a slave again.
Where does he say he's looking for tax-funded subsidies? Nowhere. I suspect he is gathering his own resources to create a piggy bank for on-Mars colonisation and maybe he's invited a few of his billionaire mates to add to it as well.
Mars is a boring desert planet. I can't go swimming, I can't go hiking, I can't go mountain biking. I prefer to live on our "fragile" planet. A colony on Mars ... is a recipe for a horror movie.
2:44 That is a textbook definition strawman. As far as i have gathered, the reason to stablish the mars colony is to prevent a mass extinction event that ends life on earth from wiping humanity altogether, not to "escape the problemas we have on earth".
If earth goes down mars goes down, the colony there will be totally dependent on earth forever. A colony there does nothing to ensure human survival, that is just a marketing trick by musk for his not so smart fans. On the contrary - the constant drain of this colony would speed up the overexploitation of earth even faster, and thus the end of humanity.
Basically European style thinking. Their adventures all moved to America and Australia ages ago. And the modern one all worked for Silicon valley and Elon freaking Musk. And all the while East Asians are busy copying and trying their hardest to catch up. That is why Europe is stagnating.
@@arthurlau98 europe is deindustrializing as we speak failed state in 20 years
Uhhh… Mass extinction event on earth? The conditions in Mars NOW is much much worse than the conditions for mass extinction that will ever occur on earth. If earth is going to be hit by a huge asteroid, earth will still have an atmosphere with some breathable oxygen, some surviving sea animals, temperature more manageable than Mars, and WATER and GRAVITY. If you are going to build closed and insulated housing structures for human survival in Mars, you can also do that on earth with much less technical and resource challenges. Need I go on?
The investment it would take for even a modest early mission to Mars is badly needed here on earth, end of story.
I mean, you can do both. Resources aren't as limited as they appear. However, a manned mission to Mars (even for a short time) would be an achievement at this point. Colonizing is something we're not remotely ready for as we can't even get ISS astronauts to be able to live there and it's MUCH easier to live on the ISS than on Mars.
Ehh... I think the possibility of giving humanity a fighting chance at survival (however low it may be) is more worth it than throwing away money to the corrupt & greedy politicians & CEOs of the world who would be in control of those investments on Earth.
The estimate I gave in my book Marsworld is around $18 billion for a ten year programme (ambitious but not startingly ambitious like Musk's timeline). It's not that expensive but $18 billion over 10 years equates to about 20 cents per person per annum. That's not going to solve any of our "big" problems.
End of story? Does that mean that is all the logic you can bring to bear on the topic. Your response is so typical for those brainwashed by Liberal education. Rhetorical question here: What percentage of your wealth do you donate to charity and solving the world's problems?
Musk can fund a Martian colony as a private enterpenaur without issues with legal red tape. He can't simply swoop in and force the world to cut all carbon power generation in the same way. So if you ignore the illusion that all money is part of a shared pool and try and figure out what one billionare can acheive long term within his lifetime (which is presumably still something the billionare cares about) then building an off world colony is the best bet at ensuring humanities survival.
I strongly believe that there should be research facilities on both Mars and the Moon. That will enable scientists to determine what conditions are truly like and what will be possible and impossible.
At least research would serve a purpose. Unlike colonisation.
@@saumyacow4435 Colonisation of Mars would get rid of people who think that living on Earth is A Bad Idea. So could be a win for Earth.
Yes, much more research to be done first. Example: we don't even know if mammalian species like our own can successfully bring a pregnancy to term at 1/3 earth gravity. Musk is getting WAY ahead of himself on Mars.
You don't need people for that, it would just be more expensive. Scientifically, even sending people to space at all did not make much sense. It did to some point in the early days because robotics were bad, but today the only meaningful research which needs humans in space is exploring, how humans can live in space. And that probably will not be really useful for hundreds of years.
@@salia2897
One would need people there to study the effects of living on these spheres on humans and their bodies.
Hi Sabine. You don't need a pop filter for the SM7B. The SM7B comes with 2 different windscreens (the foam on the mic). You have the default one on currently. If you use the bigger one that came in the box for the mic, you'll have all the plosive control you'll ever need.
Mars One received interest from over 200,000 applicants for the first round.
And cybertruck received millions of reservations, almost all of which were cancelled.
Yup, but saying there is no interest is false. A couple thousand is already the critical mass needed. Over time more and more will join once the Mars colony gets more pleasant.
Yeah these naysayers are silly. There are plenty of people that would go immediately as soon as it is possible. The last hundred years is the first time in the history of mankind that there is no frontier and there will always be some percentage driven to go into one if it is possible. That is just the nature of humanity.
@@idonotlikethismusic false, CT received over 1 million reservations and it is the best selling EV truck in the world
@@PeteQuad And the people were looking for a better life, sometimes the paradise. Mars is nothing like that, it is far more hostile than Antarctica. And you can not get there for a few cheap dollars.
I disagree on the point of "first develop needed technology, then move to use it" - human progress is by and large about pressing forward despite not having all the eggs in the basket sorted properly (or some such metaphor) and figuring out, along the way, how to do it well enough to succeed.
What impetus is there to develop mars colonization technology without being on Mars? Without a concentrated geopolitical will - which is currently unfeasible for anyone except the Chinese - there can be no long term planning that is needed for this kind of "prepare to go, then go". The only thing that can bring westerners to Mars is a startup mantra of "start going and figure it out as you go".
I'm having a hard time imagining a colony on Mars without a dentist, a surgeon, a medical lab with all its updated supplies, a hardware supply, and all the everyday support infrastructure we presume to take for granted. It would be a rare breed who could endure the nonstop challenge of bare existence.
@btpcmsag that's why you're not an explorer - explorers don't ask "who will take care of my teeth when I get to my destination", they just go, and they'll figure out the teeth situation when they get there (or not, as the case may be).
@@btpcmsag that's because you're not an explorer. Explorers don't ask "who will take care of my teeth when I get there?" They just go, and the teeth situation will take care of itself (or it won't, as the case may be).
Elon makes it sound like you could just go for a vacation if you saved up enough. What about the 7 months each way to get there and back?
Due to Mars' rotation around the sun after Sunday, January 12, 2025 the next window of opportunity for us to reach Mars will be in 2035. Outside of that window it is out of reach for the most part.
Theoretically using fusion power and travelling near speed of light and resulting time dilation (slow aging of the traveler) solves that problem. In practice, Elon is far away from solving that problem (travel at >90% of c in Star Ship version 100, not too late and still affordable - nearly impossible combination of sub-goals).
He was talking about going to Mars like you are going on a little trip. If the average person can’t afford a home or healthcare here - Space Travel? How will you afford to live there, like how much does Air cost? Water? Food? Heating? Space Suits? Renting the Pod you live in, in the Municipal Pod you live in that has good air, your AirPod. Will he pay for people to live there?
Elon is a great rich liar and hoax. No more...
@@vishalmishra3046 'Near speed of light'? Mars is a long way away, but nowhere near far enough to reach even half of the speed of light. There are limits to acceleration.
Four crew can land, set up a solar panel array, an RTG power source, and use electric ATV's to dig out a four foot deep landing spot and place a beacon.
One large Bigelow habitat with wheels could be landed at, or near, the beacon and moved into position.
Vaccuum pumps inflate the Bigelow hab with Mars CO2. It should hold its shape once filled. The crew then moves a lot of Mars regolith (with ice in it) inside and puts it into plastic tubs.
Use Moxie units inside the hab to change the CO2 to oxygen, use space heaters to provide heat, and open a nitrogen cylinder to provide a buffer gas and 5 psi internal pressure. The heat and pressure gets you liquid water that is already in the regolith.
The crew then uses the electric ATV's to move regolith on top to provide protection from cosmic rays.
The crew enters, removes their Mars suits, and washes the percholorates out of the regolith. They then set up hydroponic growing and plant vegetable seeds in the plastic growing tubs. The vegetables will remove CO2, produce oxygen, and be food. This habitat will be almost completely self sufficient.
I think it would be more logical to have Elons robots to set up the habitation, they don’t require oxygen and could do the physical grunt work? 😊
I think that is what he is planning. That’s why he is confident
Just send Elon there himself and be done with it.
10 launches a day for 2 years? That chap's going to fry our atmosphere. There's enough soot in stratosphere already thanks to him.😲
I wrote a paper on this topic 10 years ago. Elon actually read it and modified his rap on the subject. The bottom line is that a self-sustaining colony is at least 1,000 years in the future. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on the project.
He made a truck to transport illegal earthlings, but he did not bother to design the house where they will live.
Don't you think the earlier we try the better will get and the sooner will learn the needed lessons to be a self-sustaining colony?
@@VuyaniMagibisela So let me guess. Pile bricks randomly to see if we build a house is the way to go? Nope. We need to design the house first, then build the house, test it on the moon and learn, and then go to Mars.
For all practical purposes, the moon is a better training ground. Mars has almost no atmosphere, so there is not so much difference with the moon. And you have nasty dust on the moon and nasty perchlorate dust on Mars.
@@josepablolunasanchez1283 yeah I agree with that, what I don't agree with is not doing it or focusing on it, let's start now let's not all focus on earths problems let others start with the exploration of space, we started on the moon and we go beyond.
@@VuyaniMagibisela Space colonies are houses, real estate. If we do not care about it we should ban Earth real estate too. Space transportation is trucks, if we do not like it we should ban trucks too.
So space is just as earthling business as any other business.
Going to space and populate it is like creating Las Vegas in the middle of nothing. Should we ban Las Vegas?
The amount of scientific illiteracy of people is so appalling.
13:43 “…and I think my toaster is plotting against me” 😂😂😂😂
It would be far more practical to move underground on Earth when the time comes.
Uh oh, don't let Elon hear you, or he'll start boring everyone with his boring company junk again. I agree with you, to a deg🎉ree. At least, we could build a Musk "colony" deep in a disused coal mine, and see how the volunteer residents fare. If they hate it, we can call it a prison
The North Vietnamese are used to that.
In a billion or so years the sun will become a red giant before it it burns out and becomes a tiny white dwarf star. However once it becomes a red giant, the Earth will be reduced to a cynder and perhaps even completely disintegrated. Living under ground will not save anyone.
I really liked this new format video with the showing of both sides and intresting clips
The problem with Mars colony is that it's so easily wiped out. One unexpected event/storm/meteor in wrong place can destroy the one million people colony. Humankind on earth is partly so resilient because we are spread geographically on large area, basically whole planet.
If the Mars colony has a 1-100 chance of being wiped out every year, and humans on Earth have a 1 in 1000 chance of being wiped out every year, any time that humans on earth are wiiped out, there is a 99% chance we survive still on Mars, and can return to earth to repopulate.
That's the point. Spread out more to be more resilient.
@@RandyHill-bj9pc "and humans on Earth have a 1 in 1000 chance of being wiped out every year"
What is the source of this probability magnitude?
Right. Plus, a Mars colony would be powerless against malicious AI which could merely hack into already necessary robotics and AI on Mars or even send their own rockets.
If you actually do a critical evaluation of possible 'extinction to last person' scenarios on Earth, NONE of them are served by a Mars colony. It's all just Musk 'riffing' on sci-fi themes. But not first principals science.
I love your work. Your intelligence and wit are so much fun. I appreciate you pointing out what needs to be stated about the logistics and timing. As well as the resources that would be better used both here and now for so many essentials it's to much to list. Thank you
A conversation between Sabine and Robert Zubrin on this topic would be amazing
She doesn't touch on the lack of gravity and how that causes health problems to the human body. The radiation is another huge problem
lack of gravity? on mars?
its close to HALF Earths gravity.
thats fine for us. a little working out will solve that.
plus we ADAPT. future colonists will have it easier and easier.
@@TheSighphiguy We don't really know much yet about the long term effects of reduced gravity
(and nothing at all about fetal development in those conditions).
We also don't know much about our ability to keep closed environments healthy for a VERY long time (hint: bacteria and viruses evolve much much faster than us).
Imagine setting up to colonize Mars in a grand scale and realizing after a decade that people there develops all sort of debilitating physical conditions, can't give birth to healthy children, gets all sort of nasty infections from mutated bacteria and viruses that we can't purge from the habitats, and can't even get back to Earth because re-adaptation to 1 G is too risky... those are real possibilities.
We talk a lot about our current lack of geo-engineering skills to terraform Mars, but I feel that we should rather ask ourselves if our bio-engineering skills are up to the task.
@@rp3351 i was only speaking to the "gravity" on Mars. not "terraforming.
We should ignore Mars for now(colonywise) and focus on the Moon.
baby steps...
@@TheSighphiguy yeah we should definitely gather more expertise about living off-earth for long time before plotting the conquest of Mars.
Outposts on the Moon, new and bigger space stations orbiting Earth, possibly with centrifuges to simulate martian gravity...
@@TheSighphiguyLes than half the gravity will cause more than half the problems, but when it comes to accelerated genetic damage, that could well be a big problem still. And the gravity of a planet is not something we can ever terraform.
Oh for cryin out loud - If Elon wants to go to Mars... Send him.
Plus One... The Orange Imbecile.
We just don’t want to fund his trip!
He will go and will fund it mostly itself like he is funding the starship program mostly himself. The whole idea behind starlink is to be a money generator to support the mars mission.
Smashed it Sabine! Well put together, and argued.
On the point of volunteers: I personally know a couple of people who volunteered for that. Not everyone value their lives above the excitement of the unknown ))
So these knuckleheads are the ones that you believe should repopulate human populations in the event of a planet-killing event?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Especially as there is not much room for pioneering left on earth.
There are always those who strife to go where no man has gone before.
I don't want to go to Mars, but Near Earth Orbit is even less hospitable and yet you have people queuing up to become astronauts, so I am dubious nobody would want to go.
Volunteering to die on Mars for Musk is not my idea of a good time
One of my old profs had met and spoken to some of the Apollo astronauts, and he asked them if they would have volunteered if they had known that it was a one-way trip. They all said yes.
I think that we will still be able to find enough people with The Right Stuff.
This is the best format, Sabine. No useless visual effects and more in-dept exposition. Super!
I think its more about balancing the two formats. The other one attracts newer viewers interested in scientific topics, while this one is better for people who are fairly versed. I think of them like different classes in "Sabine" school. Where some students would love to just move to the next one and forget the previous one, some students even though in the next class still enjoy the lectures from the previous.
No useless visual effects? Did you even watch this video? I can hardly think of a more annoying and useless visual effect than those horribly outdated axial jump cuts twice a minute in this video clip.
@@savagex1322 Good point. I suck at marketing, and you are probably right: she needs to optimize for both "new school" and "old school" audiences. Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
12:04 I feel attacked
Let us prove we can land on the moon before talking about Mars.
Why isn't lunar travel possible today?
As long as Elon is on the first ship, let him go. It’s a one way ride.
You forgot to mention that the dirt on Mars is poison.
Our soil is the accumulation of millions of years of dead remains of living organisms. Start there before going any further.
A very mild poison thats easily cleaned from soil or suits with water, and Mars is awash with underground water at every latitude.
Go look up precision fermentation. Mars dirt will not be required.
@@GntlTch But fine Mars dust will be relentlessly trying to get into every habitat, vehicle and pressure suit (and from there into lungs and then into graves). Particularly as equipment has to go out and come back in. Can it be combatted to some extent? Yes, but it will waste vast quantities of precious water, volume, mechanical equipment and time and never be completely successful. Of course, you should think of all that instantly from my comment without me having to explain it to you.
Wait a minute. The Martian Chronicles makes no mention of any poison in Martian soil. You're propagating fiction.
I used to live in Kansas. It is green and clean, and I truly miss it. I now live in Southern NV. There are areas here that look very much like Mars. I used to play a game with my brother. I would send him a photo of Mars and ask him, Las Vegas or Mars? Then I would find an area covered with red rock and devoid of vegetation, and ask, Las Vegas or Mars? Sometimes he would not be sure which, as long as the blue sky wasn't in the photo. He lives in Iowa. For us, Iowa and Kansas may not be Mars, but there's no place like home. I suspect that the early residents of Mars will have a strong longing for a pair of red heels they can click together to get back home to Kansas. I often have that wish even in Nevada.😂
well since they will all be blind because of radiation, i suspect that wont be a problem for them
He wants to be "The Elon" like in Wernher von Braun's novel about Mars.
In the book "Projekt Mars" the leader of the Mars colony is called "The Elon"
Every dinosaurus, every extinct animal or plant that ever lived is cheering on our space exploration efforts. The essence of life is to spread, not to limit itself. If we are the only planet with life we have the duty to spread life to other planets. Yes, protect Earth. But also spread outside. These are not mutually exclusive and everybody knows that. We, unlike millions of species before us have the chance. Because we can, we should.
Good post
Animals are cheering?
I have yet to observe any animal "cheer" for any reason whatsoever.
To offer one's approval for anything is an intellectual act and requires the faculty of WILL, something only humans have: intellect and will.
So your "animals cheering" is a flaccid fantasy, at best.
quit the weed
Smoking pot and making grand teleological claims is worthless, you may as well have not said anything. Your sentimentalism makes me sick.
For sure, we are likely the first species that can even think about the wider universe,
humanity is hardly perfect, but with all that we have achieved, we will spread life across the universe!
(Tho we should probably fix our mess on earth first, Atleast the Fuel is running out, so we'll go green regardless)
And cheer up Owen & Aksel, persue your passion , Listen to your doupts & prove them wrong!
1:54 Richard Dawkins is looking more and more like a 'Thunderbirds' puppet by the year, and behaving like one too. I used to admire him, but now I just see him as a clown.
im sure he doesnt want to be that
we should tell him to watch this video
:) Good observation, I couldn't quite put my finger on why he looked weird.
He always was one.
It takes a pretty self-centered person to believe that life is just the result of "selfish genes."
@@sumnergrey4301 👍🏻
People started building cathedrals in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be finished for generations. With modern technology we can duplicate those efforts in five years or less. Consider the reconstruction of Notre Dame after the fire. Yes it will probably be cheaper and easier to get to Mars in the future, but that is no reason to abandon attempts to get there now. With that kind of attitude human progress will just stall and fail.
We need to make this planet livable first. If we can't do that, then no one will survive on Mars, even if you could overcome all the obstacles.
We started agriculture knowing it would take several thousand years to come to fruition. And it took 12,000 years for us to get back to the same nutritional level as pre-agricultural cultures.
Humans had already been doing selective breeding for a long time (earliest wolf domestication likely started 45,000 years ago). We knew it would be hard and take an eternity.
If we can start a project like that when we only had 4 million people on they planet, we can certainly start going to Mars as soon as possible. Especially when agriculture effectively cost them like 90% of their GDP, and it'll never go past 1% for us.
@@johnphantom This planet is already livable, it's been so for a very long time. Your premise is detached from reality.
@ you are dense if you don't see how we are rapidly approaching extinction.
If you don't see global warming then I don't know what to tell you, other than get educated.
I see most people here miss the point of a Mars colony. Don't think about it as an escape from planet Earth, but a steppingstone to expanding human presence in the cosmos. Terraforming Mars (and Venus) can be an experiment in geoengineering, one that is more controlled and deliberate than what we're doing now an Earth. It can be a learning experience to safely develop techniques that we would then use safely on Earth.
If we look a bit further than the immediate future, the universe has given us two worlds that we can use as steppingstones to expand human presence in the cosmos: Mars and Venus. Sure terraforming would take hundreds of years, but it is possible.
Furthermore, developing the capability to transport humans to Mars gives us more flexibility when dealing with cosmic threats to our own world: such as asteroid or comet strikes. And here there's one point worth mentioning: while the asteroid threat is pretty well understood at this point, people usually underestimate the threat from comets and extrasolar rocks: we find new ones every year and with current technology we'd have a few months warning at best if spotted a threatening one and very little we could do to stop it.
A self-sustaining Mars colony would ensure the survival of the human species in case of a civilization ending comet strike on Earth, or in case of nuclear war, which is an ever-increasing threat these days. And while it is easier to fix the climate of Earth than terraforming Mars, the same can't be said about convincing all the powers on Earth to give up their nuclear weapons. It has been tried. It has failed.
But, Musk is also wrong in saying that colonizing Mars would guarantee the future of consciousness: there are possible cosmic events that can wipe out life on a solar system wide scale; to truly guarantee the future of consciousness we have to go even further and colonize other star systems.
... and he's also wrong in using methane to get off Earth. The booster for starship should be hydrogen powered. Using Methan on the scale he's proposing is a huge contribution to climate change.
In disaster recovery planning, there's a concept - I don't remember the term offhand - that whatever disaster you're preparing for should not take out the backups when it takes out your primary infrastructure.
So, if you're in Silicon Valley and you're planning your disaster recovery around an earthquake, you don't want your backup to be anywhere near the Cascadia subduction zone, because if the Cascadia fault slips, it'll likely take out your primary as well as your backup. Better to put your backup in, say, North Dakota.
If you're in Florida and your anticipated disaster is a hurricane, don't put the backup in Texas or Louisiana or along the East Coast; put it in Arizona. If you're in Toronto and your disaster is a blizzard, put your backup in Vancouver, not in New Brunswick. And so on.
There aren't many things that can wipe out humanity as a species. An asteroid strike. Nuclear war. Chemical or biological weapons. Grey goo. A gamma ray burst. A supervolcano. I'm sure there are a few others. We're widely distributed enough on the planet that even most of those might be survivable, albeit with a vastly reduced population. But any conceivable backup that's on the same planet will probably be almost as vulnerable to those as our main civilization is.
That's the appeal of going to Mars. The vast majority of the things powerful enough to wipe us off of this planet are not going to wipe us off of Mars, if we can get a Martian colony to the point of being self-sustaining. It's no different than an off-site backup, or how someone in the presidential or royal line of succession is always kept away from the others.
Mars is so hostile to life that it doesn't even have unicellular organisms. I think any humans unfortunate enough to live and work on Mars would struggle daily to survive, let alone thrive (reproduce and raise children). What good is an offworld colony as a backup of humanity when they can't grow as a population? As someone who raises my own crops, even doing that on Earth in a geographic area conducive to food staples is much harder than a lot of people think.
@@judgejudyandexecutioner If you haven't noticed, the universe is hostile to life. That is why it is not smart to put all of humanities' eggs all in one basket.
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
- Larry Niven
Possibly the greatest threat to humanity's survival is------ humanity itself. If we go to mars, we'll be taking the seeds of our further demise with us.
I think artificial space colonies like the O'Neil Cylinders, Ringworlds, etc. are far more feasible economically and don't take hundreds of years, unlike terraforming Mars. I think planets are better off being mined than living in. As mentioned here, it's unlikely that anyone will WANT to actually live in these planets, considering how harsh the conditions are.
Venus at least has decent gravity, atmospheric pressue and sunshine if one would ever manage to build some kind of floating cities above the deadzone. The ice moons might at least have plenty of water and thermal springs (which also means oxygen and hydrogen) if we could drill through the ice. Mars is honestly just Moon but further away. The atmosphere is so pityful it barely counts, only energy source is nuclear. Minerals? Might as well mine in the asteroid belt at that point.
@@Alias_Anybody Every version of anywhere in the solar system is hell compared to anyplace on Earth. Antarctica and the Sahara are thousands of times more livable than any place in space. Until we can master people living in the ISS, we're not ready for Mars or anywhere else. ISS astronauts can't be up there for more than about a year. Until we extend that to 80, we can't go anywhere.
You can’t build those without a massive amount of material. Which is part of the reason to go to mars, you can build a space elevator there so it actually makes building mega space stations possible once you have a space elevator from mars.
I remember attending a lecture about Mars colonisation in 2013 and bringing up the lack of magnetosphere and also the low gravity (which would cause bone deformities and muscle mass loss for long-term inhabitants) and a professor casually dismissing these concerns because "they'll come up with something." It was incredible to see a PhD in astrophysics get so caught up with hype. For context, I am not a scientist and thought my objections were based in high school level science.
They are based in high school science and you're right. There's no practical consideration that going to Mars would work. We don't know nearly enough about the requirements humans need to live to take them off-planet for any amount of time. We can't even keep astronauts on the ISS in good health long-term and they experience 90% of Earth's gravity and have all the oxygen, food and water they need.
The low gravity problem are worse on the moon or in any current tech space station so not a particularly strong argument against mars. If anything it the biggest argument for it as it’s the highest gravity level we can reasonably come by that isn’t earth. The proximity to the asteroid belt is also a huge draw.
@stebot1 Venus has comparable gravity to earth
Bingo Sabine, your final analysis is right on point! Exactly what I have been thinking.
Mars is just another planet that we can walk on that happens to be close by. That said, is it really much better than the Moon?
Yes, partly because it has higher gravity, but mainly because it has large quantities of water, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. It also has a day/night cycle almost identical to Earth
Yes and no. Yes, it has a day/night cycle similar to earth, it's gravity is higher than earth like previous reply pointed. Higher gravity allows an atmosphere where, as moon has virtually no atmosphere. Mars seems to have ice on its pole. If it is ice water, it could solve a huge problem for potential civilization.
No, because it's far away from earth, and to get there, it's a few months of journey, but the moon is just a couple of days away.
When it comes to being protected from solar radiation, it is a pretty much similar approach.
In my opinion, if we just want a civilization that is outside of our planet moon is easier compared to Mars in terms of transportation time and cost it takes and also if the new civilization needs an emergency evacuation or something similar. But if we are talking about what if something happens to earth, like a meteor strike that has the power to wipe out everything, then the moon is also not much safer since how close it is relative to earth.
We invented an MRI machine in our quest to reach the moon. I wonder what we might invent trying to get to Mars??
@@anthonybrett Imagine what we'll invent just trying to live permanently on the Moon. Your comment is also not really relevant regarding practically of where humans should settle.
its more of a challenge. Take some samples. Take some happy snaps. And bugger off back to Earth. There is a point in reaching Mars. There is no point in living there long term.
Whether or not the current efforts succeed in putting a human colony on Mars, it should be understood that, if humans succeed in the future at becoming a multi-planet, or even a space faring species, that journey ultimately began with Elons efforts. Before SpaceX it was as if we took for granted an assumed guarantee that we would eventually get around to settling other planets, as if that was just a given logical progression for us and the ability to do so would just fall onto our laps when the time was right. Except, in reality, we were actually slowly becoming disaffected with our excitement towards space being the next frontier for humanity. I think Elon deserves a lot of credit for getting people excited about space again, because it it really brings out the better side of humanity when we're reminded that we're all on the same side. There's some really major moments for humanity out there. Landing people on another planet, setting up a permanent structure on the moon or Mars, finding microbial life and realizing that, at least on some level, we aren't alone in the universe. Those are the kinds of moments that gets everyone all on the same side. Maybe Elon won't succeed in building a colony on Mars, but it will be because of the efforts from everyone at SpaceX that we'll have a greater understanding of the problems that we'll need to overcome. That's the whole point of standing on the shoulders of giants.
Whilst living on Mars is at present an absurd idea, it is providing motivation for the Starship which will massively reduce the cost of sending payloads into orbit, and hence it will be a major contribution to space development. The moon will surely become a mining and manufacturing base, thanks to Starship and lookalikes. As for expensive things always being led by nation states, well the conquest of India by the British was led by private industry, as was the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Development of semiconductors was essentially privately funded, their production costs a fortune. Starship itself would be very expensive were it lead by government. Instead Musk is developing a new super rocket for much less than the SLS system that is government financed. The SLS cost more than two billion dollars per launch, Starship should cost 1/10 of that, if not much less. Very expensive things can be done privately if there is a sufficient return on investment.
"Very expensive things can be done privately if there is a sufficient return on investment." But that's very much the point. To my understanding, there is absolutely no money to make going to mars (contrary to inventing the transistor or conquering India). So why would people invest large amounts on that ?
Why is living on Mars absurd? People do things others consider obsurd literally all the time. YOU not liking it doesn't mean a thing on the grand scale. Everyone thinks their personal perspective is everything.
It'll always be an absurd idea if we don't follow through on it.
@ There is as good as no air, so you’ll need a source of oxygen at least. Water is present but buried deep and must be mined and purified. No atmosphere means no open fields, so plants and animals must be housed in giant shed with glass roofs or roof lights. Thus the cost of food will be extremely high. The cost of buildings will be high as they must be airtight. The overall cost of a self sustaining colony would be massive with no revenue generation. And we have never constructed a successful long term sealed environment. Hence the idea is currently absurd.
@@amguardia Exactly. The moon might be financially worthwhile, Mars not.
Instead of trying to go to an uninhabitable planet (at an evolutionary stage where it's not feasible to do so) Musk should concentrate on research and development of asteroid detection and deflection and improving environment protection. Take care that AI dev stays safe. Be a good employer. Maybe even do something good for global politics by being a good advisor to Trump. There's a lot you could do with dozens of billions of dollars.