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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.
The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.
You don't think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren't aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.
Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.
Scientists catalog what we know and don't know and try to chip away at the list of things we don't know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don't know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don't know.
The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:
Space colonization may happen, but it's incredibly doubtful that it'll happen in our lifetimes.
Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.
We can't breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We'd need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.
But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn't just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.
NASAs rover has already successfully tested a carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion system, MOXIE.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/moxie/
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet/
If they can do it on a rover, it's pretty trivial to scale that up to an industrial scale.
In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we'd need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That's not trivial.
Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.
Elon would send Neurolink Zombies to die en masse if he could.
Jesus Christ you people really have no idea how space works, do you?
The guy can't just send up his own spacecraft anymore than Lockheed Martin and Raytheon can declare war on Russia.
SpaceX sells spacecraft to NASA for them to use in the same way LM sells F-18's to the Navy for them to use. At no point in time does Elon just get to unilaterally send civilians to Mars even if Starship was fully capable.
Everything SpaceX craft do in space is under the charter and dictation of NASA, and at the current point in time, exclusively for government/military missions. Not his own flights of fancy.
Hence the "if he could."
Hence why it's a pointless comment.
Elon can't do it, great. Next!
Which is why you don't hear NASA going "yep we're good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!" Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.
Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can't remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.
Space colonization is the future, it doesn't matter if it's ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.
Did we even read the same article?
The authors aren’t against colonization. They’re against hasty, uninformed, reckless attempts.
very musk lol
The point of books like this is to underline areas where we're still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn't just complaining. It's taking stock of what we still need to learn.
Unfortunately on lemmy its only purpose is so people can circle jerk about how dumb Musk is for wanting that to be the end goal of SpaceX hardware.
you really should read it, this characterization is bullshit.