I’d say I told you so, except that I didn’t tell you — it was such a ludicrous concept that I didn’t believe it when I first heard it. Mars One is this scheme to get 100 volunteers for a one-way mission to Mars first, and then develop a way to get them there second. It’s not working. The project is falling apart.
So, here are the facts as we understand them: Mars One has almost no money. Mars One has no contracts with private aerospace suppliers who are building technology for future deep-space missions. Mars One has no TV production partner. Mars One has no publicly known investment partnerships with major brands. Mars One has no plans for a training facility where its candidates would prepare themselves. Mars One’s candidates have been vetted by a single person, in a 10-minute Skype interview.
Then there’s the weird business of trying to bootstrap themselves into solvency by creating ‘celebrities’ who’d get paid interviews, and then spit back 75% of their celebrity cash to Mars One. That’s only going to work with an obliging media that adores superficial flash over content…wait. That might work. That’s the only kind of media we’ve got.
OK, now announcing Europa One! I’m looking for 1000 volunteers to be flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, launched to Europa, and then take up living under the Europan ocean. My grand plan is to launch a nuclear bomb to blast a hole in the ice first, and then have the Europa One rocket splash down inside it, where everyone would gently thaw out on immersion.
That’ll work, I’m sure of it. Send money now.
And look, it’s a giant ocean of liquid water. It’s got to be more hospitable than Mars. Send more money.
But on the other hand, Mars doesn’t have gigantic hostile space-squid, scudding in sinister silence under the surface of a frozen ocean, their barely-contained rage waiting to erupt should invaders be so foolish as to set foot/claw/pseudopodia onto their world. So there’s that.
I initially thought it was a scam, although the statements I’ve read by the lead person on it (Bas Lansdorp) made me think he might just be that delusional. Space colonization tends to draw in the unrealistically romantic folks, rich and poor.
My thoughts on space colonization are unchanged. If it happens, it will probably happen in space colonies built in orbit and slowly accelerated outwards, since you can essentially set your own internal conditions and simulated-gravity-by-rotation doing so versus living on a planet or moon. Maybe some day NASA will get the funding to do a Mars Direct style mission to Mars, but it will just be that – a series of manned missions, not a colonization effort. Colonizing lifeless (or life-poor) hyper-deserts with unbreathable atmospheres is rather stupid.
Or the whole idea of paying for it with “Reality Television”, which is ridiculous. Do they honestly think people will want to watch a bunch of people doing tests and repetitive maintenance over and over again for months and years?
Ehm, Europa is perfectly inhabitable and the Mediterranean sea is very nice to swim in.
I’ll see myself out…
Hmmm. This plan is slightly better thought out than Mars One’s plan.
1) The chances of the astronauts acutally surviving the trip there is equal to those of the Mars One group.
2) Access to needed life resources (water) is actually part of your plan, but from what I’ve seen, not part of theirs. They seem to rely on “*POOF*! A Miracle Happens!” for a lot of stuff.
3) The larger number of
suckersparticipants will increase the chances of enough funding toretire in the cayman islandssucceed at the project.I was hoping it would work. Just the hype of picking the 100 would drive some interviews and interest from sponsors which would fund the initial research and TV work.
Sure the actual launch probably would not happen, and if it did happen those 100 would most likely die, but I was really hoping the hype would both fund some good research and work as well as building some public pressure for more research and actual work towards going to mars.
It was a longshot, but I’m glad someone tried at lease.
First it’s money-for-debate, now Europa.
What’s going on?
Europa sounds more realistic as space colonies go, since there’s probably liquid water and a decent shot of pre-existing life. Of course, we’d probably want to build Sea Lab 2021 on Earth as practice, first, and hope it goes better than the cartoon.
Thinking about it, it’d be ironic if we got people to Europa, hoping to have an easier time domesticating and eating Europapean chemosynthetic lobsters and such for food (over squeezing out just enough food to get by on a hydroponics wing on a Mars base), only to find out their amino acids and proteins use the wrong hand.
This just might work:
1) Select a bunch of gullible people to get in a rocket ship going to Planet X
2) ???
3) Profit!!
NASA/Ames had an open house last year that included an “Ask a NASA Scientist” panel. So I asked six NASA scientists why people should be sent to Mars, instead of just continuing to send robot probes. I got an assertion that robot probes move too slowly, and a lot of hand-waving, but I never heard a thing that sounded like a good, solid reason.
The check is in the mail!
Please send me my nitrous oxide so I can begin my preparations!
…a mixture of amazement and hilarity.
Cynic! I for one am confident of a warm embrace from our new friends the Europan space squaaaaaarrrgghhhhh!!!!!
Are we married to the name “Europa?” It’s not going to play well in the flyover states. Can we rename it “America Jr.?”
Are either of these projects actively recruiting hairdressers and telephone sanitizers?
I wish stories like this did not feel like space travel and colonization is less likely to happen but it does.
When the enthusiasm of people for exploration is taken advantage of to do nothing but hype and hustle and governments led by US gives lip service and token commitment to building any future at all.
All hail the status quo!
as if things never change regularly in unexpected and unfortunate ways.
but I guess that the silver lining is that there is the enthusiasm still there in people that some would even volunteer for such a one way trip.
uncle frogy
I’ve always wondered: have those who advocate sending people to live for good on moons and other planets figured out what to do about the radiation?
Newt Gingrich’s moon colony: what were they going to do, build it out of lead? Wouldn’t those people get fried, especially by every passing solar flare? (Well, it was a fantasy anyway, doesn’t need to actuall work.) And on Mars, are they going to live underground? What about the trip there, doesn’t it take years or something, wouldn’t they be dead on arrival from radiation?
Just curious to know before I sign up.
johnniefurious @13: Freedonia!
Mars One is a scam
In other news:
* Water is wet
* The Pope is Catholic
* Bears shit in the woods
James Chappell #18:
• The Pope is wet.
• Catholics shit in the woods.
• Water bears!
No, but sadly they’d probably get good ratings watching those people likely die.
ALL THESE WORDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.
I send you money if you have a cool t-shirt.
Grace’s “told you so” dance-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV4sB7O97ro
And again, send ALL your money to PZ right NOW ‘cuz geez, wouldn’t Professor Myers look totes cool in his own personal jet?
Operators are standing by. Call today!
PZ, I think you missed something in your plan. To survive the immersed thawing process, I think the new Europanians (*) will need gill implants. So, a little research still needed there. But, if you agree to make the official colony uniform orange shirts and green pants, I’m sure you can get some sweet Aquaman crossover marketing cash from Warner Brothers that will cover a trivial scientific breakthrough like working human gills. And, bonus, the Europanians will be pre-adapted to their new oceanic existence.
(*) I think Europeans might be already taken.
It just sounds like a standard Kickstarter project, and those get funded and actually executed all the time. Sure, it COULD be a scam, but then it could also be legit and delusionally over-ambitious.
Well, it really is not suprising at all although I must admit, it would have been nice. And if you are building a colony on Mars, why would people need to come back anyway? Waste of time. You’re supposed to stay and start colonising. If we have to explain this to you maybe we should have sent someone else.*
While the mere attempt at colonisation might indeed spawn some useful technologies and concepts I suspect that if the candidates were to die as suggested, that would be the convenient go-to excuse to never ever even think about a project like this again. And maybe it would be enough to off unmanned exploration at the same time (“Why bother, we’re not going to go anyway.”) Which is pretty damned annoying. Keep your filthy politics out of my science (fiction)! But a budget increase would be nice, thankssomuch.
*I can just imagine frustrated mission controllers trying to talk some very slow colonists through a very complicated procedure with a lag time of some twenty minutes. “PRESS! THE! GREEN! BUTTON! THERE! ARE! NO! OTHERS!” [Six hours later] “I think I found it. So… do I press it?”
When I heard of Mars One, I thought, Someone’s skimmed Kim Stanley Robinson, without really noticing the details. Like, the ship and other infrastructure KSR’s colonists brought must have cost trillions to build and launch. Not gonna get that out of a bit of reality TV.
#25 John Horstman
In this case, there is no difference.
#3, Giliell: You are going to be so surprised when the nuke goes off in central Europe, and the descending rocket spews out a thousand corpsicles into the resultant radioactive wasteland.
#24, latveriandiplomat: I missed NOTHING in my plan. They’re going to be over 600,000,000 km from Earth, and frozen solid. I expect zero complaints, and definitely no demands for refunds.
Mostly, no. A few propose some sort of handwavium-based shielding.
PZ Myers #29:
Well, the nuke isn’t very friendly, but the emergency frozen food supply is a nice touch. Thanks.
@#27 Eamon Knight
No kidding. KSR’s Mars colonization ship was practically a hotel in space. Not only did it have multiple rotating wheels, it also had something like 500 rooms and was quite spacious.
@Garnetstar
Depends on the radiation. Solar flares are temporary and could be dealt with by having “storm shelters” shielded by multiple inches of water – I remember Bob Zubrin of Mars Direct said it was something like 12 inches of water will stop the radiation from them, or more or less inches of other material (like dirt or soil).
Cosmic radiation requires a lot more shielding to do that, but it’s also not lethal immediately – it just increases your overall rate of cellular damage, making you much more prone to get cancer later in life (and messes with electronics, but they can compensate for that). You’d either want underground colonies, or space colonies with heavily shielded areas where people can spend most of their time and minimize the damage.
And afterwards, you’ll either be able to stretch really far, become invisible, burst into flames, or be a… strong… rock… thingy.
Booking a ticket with Air France is cheaper.
Dammit, Daz@19! I was expecting a cute picture of a bear playing in the water.
In theory free-market capitalism (FMC, overlooking the internal contradiction in that term) can do anything and do it faster and more efficiently than any other organizational model. The report I heard about Virgin Galactic yesterday seems to demonstrate that the FMC model is, at he very least, not immune to long delays associated with detailed and incremental testing and design and growing pains. Delays have stakeholders starting to question their investment.
I was aware enough to form fairly clear and detailed memories of the Gemini program and spent a lot of time as a kid following the space program. A popular notion is that the space program was mainly an issue of stuffing a guy into a can and getting a rocket to fire. The fact that it took dozens of launches to work up incrementally to the next program, not to mention the hundreds of smaller tests, and thousands of laboratory tests, gets lost. Every little piece and process had to be developed from scratch, and then repeatedly tested to failure. At which point the item usually got redesigned and the whole thing started over. Failure is typically the norm for early development. It remains to be seen if the FMC model can sustain the program and emulate the government run and financed NASA programs.
Of course Mars One isn’t just constrained by adapting a government model to the FMC system. Theirs is a special branch of the FMC system. Without an early and credible longish term commitment to go the distance and cover the costs of development, one of the strengths in a government run program, you are limited to beating the brush for investors.
Bring in the clowns … I mean creative finance people, who, using methodology that sometimes comes down to conjuring a work product into existence by force of will, loud talking, and the energetic waving of hands. Sometimes it works. I saw this when a developer bought some cheap land, bulldozed a good bit of it, stobbed in a sign describing a project he didn’t have the money for, induced some media people to write stories about his development and how good it would be, sold half the land, and used the profits to build a smaller version of what he promised. He then sold the monstrosity and walked away a multimillionaire. Unfortunately there really wasn’t much need for a combined residential development and mall in the middle of nowhere surrounded by cow pastures so there it sit. Monument to hype and the ability of smooth talk and nimble finance to manifest a real-world product out of hot air and chutzpah.
Of course, when getting on a bus it is best to know where the bus is going. What was the purpose of Mars one? Scam, or attempt to get to Mars? Given a lack of funding it looks like it failed on both counts.
On the other hand there will never be any shortage of smooth talk and energetic hand waving so nothing ventured nothing …
Garnetstar: “I’ve always wondered: have those who advocate sending people to live for good on moons and other planets figured out what to do about the radiation?”
NASA is actively working on this. Once on the moon/planet, it is fairly straightforward: dig down. Once under a few feet of rock, the radiation levels are livable.
In transit…not so much. Not only do you get zapped by any solar particles the Sun belches out, you are also bombarded by a low, but steady flux of highly energetic galactic cosmic rays. You get enough heavy nuclei that severe damage to DNA is a serious issue. And shielding isn’t practical, as it would take about 13 cm of aluminum just to drive the flux of nuclei down a factor of 2 or so. That is a lot of weight to take to Mars.
And then, of course, there is the difficulty of shedding enough kinetic energy just to get into orbit, let alone land on the planet/moon. In short, it’s “challenging”.
No, here’s a plan: Pluto One.
We find 100 volunteers, surgically remove their brains, and put them in life support cylinders supercooled to put the brains in suspended animation. We fly the cylinders to Pluto. Self-replicating von Neumann machines build mechanical bodies from available materials. The machines then install the brains in the bodies, wake them up, and Bob’s your uncle — colonists on Pluto. It’s just a matter of developing a few key technologies. Send me money.
(My earlier plan involved pseudo-crustacean fungi that fly through space, but they proved hard to find.)
A one-way trip to Mars is 2 years normally, because that’s the way that needs the least fuel. You can get there much faster if you are willing to burn more fuel. When we’re sending robots, it’s cheaper to build them so they can stand frying for two years than to add more fuel. Sending humans, it quickly becomes cheaper to add fuel than shielding. Solar storms you can handle with much cheaper shielding because it’s all coming from one place, so it’s chronic exposure that you worry about.
Anyone who goes will be at elevated risk of cancer. We already have jobs with elevated risk of cancer today: miners and flight crews, for example. And just being poor is very deleterious to health, but we tolerate that just fine in our society. I don’t think cancer is going to block space exploration.
Numerobis, Don’t forget that the particles from a solar particle event travel on heliomagnetic or planetary magnetic field, so, while the flux is outward from the sun, it is not unidirectional locally.
timgueguen #36:
Well, if tardigrades ain’t cute enough for you…
Humans are highly maladapted to existence anywhere other than the thin shell of biosphere on this planet. Anywhere else, everything kills us, either quickly (vacuum, temperatures, high speed debris) or slowly (radiation, lack of usable resources, weightlessness). Even if we manage to stay alive, we consume a steady resource stream even when doing nothing (which is what space travel consists of a lot of). Our lifespans are limited, so forget the multi-century transit time to stellar neighbors. And of course in most conceivable circumstances we’re going to want a return trip to Earth, so double the cost of any mission you design to account for that.
If we ever manage to develop true AI, that’s what’ll colonize the non-terrestrial environment. If we’re lucky, that AI will keep us around for sentimental reasons. But as far as space exploration is concerned, bio-intelligence will be the vinyl recording technology of interstellar civilization. (Sorry, Kim Stanley Robinson.)
I may be wrong on this, and anyone who knows better can (who am I kidding, will) correct me, but at present I do not think we even have a way of landing on Mars for any manned mission, and no guarantee that we can find one within the reasonable launch windows for any manned mission that we could start seriously planning now (this itself an artifact of the fact that our available propulsion systems are only barely adequate and thus must be bound by the vagaries of the most optimal planetary alignments).
It isn’t just a matter of scaling up our landing mechanisms from the smaller unmanned missions.
One of the reasons that one of the various proposed manned missions to Mars involved landing not on the planet but on one of those two puny moons….
@fmitchell (#39): Brains in cylinders to Pluto? Me go now!
If ever there were a place for the Fry/Shut up and take my money! meme…
(/Oh. Wait. I do get to vounteer people who don’t happen to be me, right?)
I’m also in the camp that thinks orbital habitats is ultimately the way space colonization will go. By the time you get the kind of technology that would make building a colony on a marginal planet like Mars, you could use the same technology to build an orbital colony, and for the cost of a planetary colony, you could probably build 10 orbital ones. The economics are going to be pretty decisive here, I think.
Strap an engine of virtually any power on one of those colonies, give it the capacity to mine resources from asteroids/comets, and you’ve got yourself a generation ship. You could tootle stepwise from asteroid to asteroid to comet all the way to the Oort Cloud, refilling at each step as you go. Give each colony the additional capacity to build another colony (self replicate!) and you could do so at every pit stop and move the surplus population into the new colony and you get exponential growth out to the Oort Cloud, and from there it isn’t much harder to hop into the neighbouring star’s Oort Cloud than it would be to head back to Earth.
The upshot is that your now star faring civilization may never need to see another actual planet ever again.
I also think it is quite ossicle that creating a colony on an uninhabitable or marginally habitable planet like Mars may end up easier than trying to colonize an earth analogue “Eden” planet with its own thriving biosphere. In the latter scenario you have to factor in all the various complications of interacting with that alien biosphere, some of which, due to the stochastic unpredictability of evolution, you would have NO chance of even anticipating beforehand (maybe you’ll be lucky and yours and the native biology will be completely incompatible and there will be no interactions to worry about, but I doubt it). I think that could easily turn out to be even harder than building enclosed environments on a barren world or even flat out terraforming the place.
No thanks, I already live there and I don’t think nuking what ice we have left will be an effective means of limiting climate change.
Daz @19:
Remember kids, don’t do school, drink your drugs, and stay in milk!
Does anyone know how many of the Mars 1 volunteers are professional telephone sanitizers?
@48: I also think it is quite ossicle that…
Smartphone auto-spell: your source for malapropisms in the 21st century!
Shit, and there I was prepared to spend the rest of my life at Mars as chief product risk assessor.
Tablet, actually, but yeah….
Amphoix@47: Yeah, that was one of the (many) problems with the end of Interstellar. By the time they’ve built all those safe, functional space habitats, there’s no longer any desperate need to go on searching for planets that are just barely hospitable for human life.
Amphiox,
You are correct that we wouldn’t at present be able to land a manned mission on Mars. A manned mission would be a whole lot heavier than anything we’ve gotten down on the surface to date. Even getting into orbit would be tough (a whole lot of kinetic energy to shed).
As to the idea of hopping from Oort cloud to Oort cloud, I’m afraid that hopping to the next habitable solar system would likely be a lot more difficult than you anticipate. First, it’s likely 10s of lightyears to the nearest habitable planet. That likely means a journey of hundreds of years. Second, during that time, you’d be bombarded by cosmic radiation that would dice and slice your DNA to ribbons–highly charged and energetic ions that can take out many base pairs with a single strike. I am an extreme pessimist when it comes to interstellar travel precisely because I understand what is involved.
“Here they come, with an insultingly thick rope.”
The Rocket of 1955
http://www.tumblr.com/search/albing%20publications
Gills? I really don’t think there’s any oxygen in that ocean.
Asteroids are not exactly evenly distributed…
Mars One seems largely incoherent as a mission plan.
They intend one-way crew launches, establishing a permanent colony; but their public roadmap only goes as far as the first crew landing. They finish by saying subsequent crews & cargo will arrive every 2 years, but they leave it at that.
The glaring omission I see is this: they describe a steady-state mission profile, with the same mission recurring bi-annually. However, the colony population is growing steadily with every landing; the mass of the supply missions would have to grow linearly with the population. They would need to launch an ever increasing number of cargo launches each cycle, with an accompanying increase in expense.
The Mars Direct mission profile makes much more sense. They clearly took inspiration from it, but seem to have naively assumed the whole thing is simpler if it’s all one way. I don’t think it is.
Mars Direct doesn’t attempt to establish a permanent colony in one hit; each 2-year mission is self contained and equivalent, but allows for infrastructure growth over time with the potential for establishing a larger long-term population down the track.
1) Launch an automated Earth Return Vehicle which processes fuel from the atmosphere.
2) When sufficient return fuel is confirmed, launch a crew & habitat, and an additional ERV.
3) The crew spends ~18 months on the surface, while the new ERV processes fuel.
4) The crew returns in the previous ERV.
5) repeat from 2 indefinitely.
You get a constant population, rather than a growing one, so each supply mission is the same. The base is (almost) constantly manned, but with a rotating crew like the ISS. (Perhaps once a proven cycle is established, the next mission could arrive shortly before the previous mission returns, though I don’t know if orbital mechanics makes that viable.)
The number of available habitat modules grows with each mission. These can be connected up to provide a larger habitat (as Mars One illustrates, though in their case is essential), so that if circumstances allow, a bigger or potentially permanent crew could be established later. However, the overall mission doesn’t rely on this being the case.
The Mars Direct mission profile also means that further launches can be delayed or halted without condemning the colonists to a prolonged death.
Water. H2O. Dihydrogen Monoxide…
If that ocean is a water ocean, it has lots of oxygen.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space @58:
SpaceX apparently have plans in the works, presumably using a variant of the Dragon as the lander.
The Mars Direct Wikipedia article claims “Research at NASA’s Ames Research Center has demonstrated that a robotic Dragon would be capable of a fully propulsive landing on the Martian surface”, though this is uncited.
If people were capable of building something large enough to function as a generation ship, perhaps they’d also be able to provide it with an artificially generated magnetosphere to protect it? (That was one of the little details I liked from the Space Odyssey TV series.)
This is where it falls down for me. Leaving aside the human crew — let’s assume a functional closed ecosystem and no individual expectation of surviving to a destination — between here and there, there’s basically nothing. How do you sustain power over that expanse of time without a renewable fuel source? I believe the current estimates for interstellar hydrogen are far too low for a Bussard ramjet to be viable.
My thinking on this is, with space habitat technology, you no longer need habitable planets. You just need a star system with its own comets and asteroids, which should, based on theory, be all of them.
The Solar Oort cloud is thought to extend out past 1 ly from the sun. If the Centauri system’s is similar in extent (and since it is a multiple system with potentially overlapping Oort clouds for all three stars, it could extend out even further), then the journey from Sol’s outer most Oort cloud objects to that equivalent in the Centauri system could be a distance of less than 2 ly. And there may be Oort cloud-like objects scattered in the interstellar space in between as well.
That could mean that the steps from refuelling body to refuelling body that could get you from Sol to Alpha Centauri would, individually, not be much longer trips that the distance you’d need to travel anyways to get from Oort cloud body to Oort cloud body within the Solar System (and by the time you envision such an attempted interstellar journey, you’re already reached the point that traveling between solar Oort Cloud bodies is routine business).
Again in this scenario, habitable planets are completely irrelevant, except perhaps as objects of scientific curiosity of places to visit for tourists.
Unlikely that Europa’s ocean would have molecular oxygen dissolved in it though, and that’s the form of oxygen you need for respiration, and the form that gills absorb.
So you’d also have to bring a really big honking electrolysis machine!
Start with the NEOs, then from there to the ones in the asteroid belt, then to Jupiter’s trojans (as well as Jupiter’s moons – the small icy moons of the outer planets work just as well as any icy asteroid/comet KBO), then the moons of the other outer planets, as well as any bodies with orbits in between like Chiron, and out to the Kuiper Belt. At any time you can also take advantage of a long period comet to park your colony by it and travel as you refuel, which will get you into the outer Kuiper Belt, and from there eventually to the Oort Cloud.
Of course it is no more feasible with today’s technology than any Mars mission, but I think from the point of view of likely projections of how future technology (as well as economics) are most likely to develop, this scenario is more likely to happen than any single shot mission to another star, or any large or sustained attempt to colonize other planetary bodies in the Solar System.
Of course we may also off ourselves, or get our technological civilization destroyed, long before ever getting even close to such a level of technology, too.
I didn’t expect anything from Mars One, but I hope that we do get off our butts and start working on getting people into space (be it other planets or just space stations), its something we’re going to need to do eventually unless we want the species to die out when our ecosystem becomes uninhabitable (unless we skip right to the Vorlon energy-being state). Personally, I’d like to see more development of the moon, it’s close enough that we can reasonably expect people to be recoverable if something goes wrong, and it would be good for working out issues with dead planet colonization. Of course, we also should be developing environmental control more here as well. *sigh* So much advancement needed, so little grant money.
Amphiox:
This is where my money lies. It’s like an anti-New York, New York: if we can’t make it here, we won’t make it anywhere.
We have billions of years before the sun cooks the planet, and after billions of years, you can be certain that humans as a species either will have gone extinct or will have evolved into something else (presumably not a “Vorlon energy-being state” whatever that is).
Is that really what you mean by what “we” need to do “eventually”? It doesn’t sound like that’s what you meant…
These seem like orthogonal issues to me. We should’ve been working on our local environmental problems long ago of course, and they are problems for us to deal with in the near term (relatively speaking). Space colonization is simply not something that will happen in that kind of time frame, nor would it be any kind of solution to our environmental/social problems even if it did. If we’re actually supposed to be thinking in terms of these geological timescales, about what “we” might eventually do in the next few billion years, climate change and so forth does not even register as a blip on the radar — which is not to say it’s unimportant, obviously. If we can’t get people to take it seriously (which is not a problem of lacking money) in my lifetime, we’re pretty much fucked, period. You can just forget about what “eventually” happens to life or the planet itself in the next few billions of years.
I don’t think there’s much we could do to the environment (short of deliberate genocide) that would result in an environmental change that entirely wipes out humanity. Rampant climate change may result in untold suffering and deaths of millions… but I doubt it’ll drive us extinct.
One well placed meteoroid, on the other hand…
Amphiox @ #63:
Okay… I’m ignorant. If there’s life down there (which is a long-shot, I know… just go with it for the sake of the argument :P), doesn’t that mean there’s a chance that there’s oxygen down there, too? Is it the miles-thick ice that keep molecular oxygen out?
For the record, I know there’s such a thing as water with no oxygen… we have places like that here on earth. I’m just wondering why that’d be the case for the entirety of Europa’s oceans…
Is that a response to me? Because I didn’t say that. A nuclear holocaust wouldn’t drive us to extinction either, but it would still be an epic disaster, no? Climate change is likewise a real problem which we have to work on seriously now — and one which presumably nobody has any reason to confuse with a form of tourism, which at best benefits a tiny fraction of everybody alive — not, say, a fuckload of years from now, if ever.
Yes, that is also something we should do to maintain the habitability of our planet, and some parts of it (at least finding the damn things early enough to do something) at least seem to be within the realm of our current technological abilities. And it relates to space, that’s true. And our planet is in space….
But that’s also significantly unlike the problem that “we” will face billions of years from now, when all hope of saving life (or “our” lives) on the planet is lost, except for figuring out space colonization of some kind. The urgency of that, for us, is zero when we’re comparing it to things like climate change or even impacts from asteroids/comets. If we work on all of that other stuff, we would be quite comfortable here for billions of years, without ever having to think about space colonies of one kind or another.
One untimely supervolcano eruption…. (Volcanic activity is now considered the prime suspect in at least 3, if not 4, of earth’s great mass extinction events, with the asteroid that killed off the dinos being the only exception.)
Humans are probably relatively extinction resistance. We have most of the hallmarks of a survivor-species (wide range, flexible generalist niche, proven track record of adaptability, high invasive potential, etc) except for small size. But resistant doesn’t mean proof. We could end up with the privilege of being the proverbial last large species to go in really bad mass extinction event.
Except we’re well on the way to discovering and charting the orbits of all the Earth-crossing asteroids that would pose an existential threat. The chance of us being caught by surprise by an asteroid large enough to cause an extinction even are already receding, and will likely be close to zero by the end of this century.
A full scale eruption of a caldera volcano like Yellowstone would strain our resources to the hilt, but you’re right — human beings as a species will now be very tough to kill through natural causes, and even a self-perpetrated genocidal act would have a tough time getting all of us.
Well, do you want to know about chances or what’s definitely the case? I don’t know if an alien organism could metabolize and breathe and so forth, in a way that that doesn’t leave 02 as a byproduct in the environment. Why not? Maybe it stores/uses the oxygen in some other form. I’m sure there are lots of molecules to pick from which involve oxygen, if we already have a place with enough interesting chemistry (not just H and O) to support a living thing.
Molecular oxygen is highly reactive. For it to persist for any length of time, it must be continually produced. There are only two known mechanisms that can produce molecular oxygen (that I know of) from a water-ice-rock-organic compound based setting. The first is ultraviolet splitting of water. At Europa’s distance from the sun, and with the ice cover, not likely. The second is photosynthesis (which is actually essentially the same thing, just mediated by organisms). Also pretty much unlikely at Europa.
Could Europan organisms evolve a mechanism that splits water, producing O2, without light? Perhaps, but probably not likely, and I’m not sure if the energetics of the available chemical substrates allow for this.
Perhaps high energy particles in Jupiter’s radiation belts, blasting Europa’s icy surface, may produce a soup of free radicals in the ice, and if there exists mechanisms for recycling of that ice back into the interior, organisms might be able to exploit that as an energy source and one can just imagine that it is possible for such reactions to potentially generate molecular oxygen.
But it is rather unlikely.
Europan lifeforms are going to have to rely on chemosynthetic mechanisms for energy acquisition. Reduction of H2 or sulfur compounds are the most likely available options they might have.
But that doesn’t get us very far with long-period comets or just random stuff from wherever you like which happens to have the right trajectory.
A Siberian or Deccan Traps like event would be even worse than that.
One would think that the chances are pretty good that at least a few tiny isolated bands of survivors would persist and recolonize the world. But some luck would have to be involved. If you get down to that level of decimation, a couple of unlucky events, like a plague or a natural climate fluctuation, could tip you into extinction before you get the chance to recover.
If humanity persists long enough, sooner or later we’re bound to get hit by a nearby gamma-ray burst, too.
Bottom line is, you can’t prepare for every conceivable possible disaster. IF you survive long enough, you are bound to face one, or more, eventually.
And if all else fails, there is still the heat death of the universe….
Another possibility is that while we don’t go extinct, we keep cycling back and forth, boom and bust style, reaching peaks of technological sophistication only for the whole edifice to collapse down again from various factors, forcing a recovery and rebuild/rediscovery phase, and never actually get a peak high enough or sustained long enough to develop the kind of technology required to colonize space to any significant degree. (Nascent space colonies, even if established, will likely perish if the mother civilization collapses, unless a level of technology is reached where they can be completely self-sufficient)
And if such a pattern is in fact the usual trajectory for an intelligent technology-capable species, this may also be an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
But after the techno-singularity, cyborgs in the future could make a wormhole to turn their ancestors into five-dimensional superbeings that could make fresh new universes for us to live in. That’s just science.
I was going to mention long-period comets, but the chances of Earth being impacted by a comet are calculated to be around 100 times less likely than an asteroid of a similar size.
We’re also getting better at detecting comets too, and while he might get less warning, given their lower mass, it shouldn’t take as much effort to deflect them. Anything is possible, the odds of destruction by comet are receding too.
As for random stuff — I assume you mean unexpected collisions/deflections? Not likely to go undetected for long with asteroids large enough to cause an extinction event.
Yep, though if the scientists who claim those eruptions were triggered by impact events are correct (I know it’s not settled) we can kill two birds with one stone. If it’s not impact related, the odds are that eruptions on that scale don’t start happening overnight, and we could have hundreds or thousands of years with the writing on the wall, which would be extremely effective in concentrating the mind regarding survival of the human race.
The truth is that it’s much easier to survive on Earth against some type of natural or human disaster (plus deflecting any unpleasant asteroids that come along with robots) versus setting up colonies explicitly as a back-up in case of a wipe-out on Earth. To justify the “colonial back-up” idea, you’d need something that couldn’t be deflected and which would vaporize the crust completely, like a minor planet impact. None of those have happened since the Hadean Period, at the latest.
As someone pointed out, that’s even true in the case of the movie Interstellar. They apparently had everything they needed in terms of forming closed-ecosystem, self-sustaining space colonies except the means to get them into space – so why not just have people live in them on Earth? Even an Earth with a completely moribund ecosystem and too much CO2 to be breathable without oxygen masks would still be vastly more habitable than a space colony.
@Amphiox
I don’t think that’s far off. I’d be willing to bet that in the next 50-100 years, we’ll have the capability to make most of the components necessary for a space colony in orbit. They might be using raw materials sent up from Earth, and they’d almost certainly be a combination of automation and remote control from Earth’s surface, but it will be available.
I’m pretty skeptical we’ll see any catastrophe in that period that could completely tank civilization back down. We’ve got some massive advantages in terms of staying power due to redundancy and especially world-wide transportation networks of supply – you can have massive crop failures in a country and not have it lead to mass starvation or even significantly higher food prices outside of places like early 1990s Somalia or North Korea. I mean, how many people in the US even noticed the major crop failures in 2012?
Barring the the invention of a suitable new propulsion system I’m afraid none of us here are going to live to see a footprint on Mars.
Sometime in the late 1950’s or early ’60’s I read a science-fiction story about a future time in which the population had divided into a small elite of high-IQ people and a huge majority of really dumb folks. This was the result of our present-time educated folk falling for the Zero-population-growth propaganda and using birth control while the less-educated did not. A (time traveler? Long-time hibernator?) from the present gave advice to the future elites: create a pervasive ad campaign for vacations and retirement and immigration to Venus. In the story, they used actual rockets to shoot people to Venus, but that could just as well be fake, because the real purpose of this was “the final solution to the Dumb Problem”, a way to kill off the low-IQ population without them catching on to what was happening. I was reminded of this story when I heard of the multitudes of volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars.
Sounds like Wells’ The Time Machine, johnhodges.
If Doctor Who taught me anything, it’s “stay the fuck off Mars.”
@#80 tacitus
“…and we could have hundreds or thousands of years with the writing on the wall, which would be extremely effective in concentrating the mind regarding survival of the human race.”
Eh, that seems overly optimistic. If the problem is a long way off/gradually growing, we’ll probably just procrastinate for a few thousand years for the sake of short-term profits, until it is too late.
Regarding space colonies, I looked into those (NASA did also) and concluded that the pressure shell was going to be under large live loads, so it would have a finite working lifespan before metal fatigue made it prone to failure. O’Niell revised his proposal to NASA; proposed a “Crystal Palace” version, a “cylindrical” row of rotating toruses (torii?) joined at the hubs, so you could disassemble the oldest torus at one end, melt it down and recast new parts to build a fresh torus at the other end as needed. All of this inside a much larger stationary shell made of rocks (lunar regolith, probably) thick enough to shield against all relevant radiation.
Regarding generation ships, to make a stable self-contained ecosystem, you would want to make the ship (hollowed-out asteroid?) as large as possible; larger ecosystems are more stable than small ones. But the larger you make it, the harder it is to make it move. Travel time, accelerating and decelerating, all that much harder the larger it is.
Barring some major surprises in physics and so on off planet colonisation will not be a way to preserve the human race, at least as we know it. Humans capable of handling the lesser gravity of other worlds and orbital colonies likely would find Earth gravity a long term health problem, just as lower gravity seems to be a long term health problem for current Earth born humans.
Johnhodges: Sometime in the late 1950’s or early ’60’s I read a science-fiction story about a future time in which the population had divided into a small elite of high-IQ people and a huge majority of really dumb folks.
Sounds to me like The Marching Morons by Cyril Kornbluth. But there are other works with a similar theme.
Prepping to avert disaster, and prepping in case of disaster are two different things. Stopping global warming will require the concerted efforts of many major nations and will directly or indirectly impact the lives of billions of people.
Preparing for the survival of human race in the event of an unstoppable catastrophe, like eruptions on the scale of the Siberian Traps, on the other hand, in theory, would only take the resources of a handful of billionaires or a government or two. Not saying it would be easy, but once the writing was on the wall, some minority of resourceful and resource-rich people would do their level best to be ready when the time came.
Dammit, I was hoping you meant Europe, not Europa. I’ve wanted to see La Boqueria in Barcelona for years…
I’m not entirely sure I’d use the word “scam”. It seems like they got the ball rolling without realizing they had absolutely no idea what they were doing and have been stuck in sunk cost mode ever since. Regardless, their death spiral is their own damn fault. Hubris kills.
In other words, never assume malignancy as an explanation when gross incompetency would suffice?
Trying to preserve/produce/promote acceptable living standards for as many of earth’s 6+ billion humans as possible is indeed a problem several of orders of magnitude greater than trying to save just enough of the population, at any quality of life whatsoever, for the sake of species survival, where you’ve already conceded that billions of deaths are going to happen and there’s not one damn thing you can do to change that.
The thing is, even if it is the case, the mechanism by which an asteroid impact triggers a Trap event isn’t really that specific. One could envision a future trajectory where international arms control fails, a new arms race occurs, and someone has an unfortunate *ahem* accident with an antimatter bomb test….
And the mechanism by which the Trap events themselves wreck the biosphere isn’t that specific either. Our civilization is ALREADY producing annual outputs of CO2 and other such gases that are approaching the low end of what the annual release of similar gases by a Trap event would have been….
It’d be pretty hard to get those raw materials sent up from Earth if any significant happens to the supporting infrastructure on earth….
In other words, asteroid mining is going to be a required technology for long term self-sufficient space colonization…. (Probably fusion power too.)
I’m not impressed either. I’ve tried to discuss this issue in my posts in the thread Fly to Mars and die in under 10 weeks? (Merged with “Hard to live on Mars”) – Secular Café.
Consider the US’s first space station, Skylab. It had a mass of about 77 metric tons and a habitable volume of 320 cubic meters. It was launched into low Earth orbit by a Saturn V minus its third state. Skylab was built from that missing stage. To send it to Mars, you’d need a third stage, one that will accelerate it to a little past the Earth’s escape velocity. That would reduce its mass by a factor of 3.3 or so, and the spacecraft’s mass and habitable volume volume would go down to 23 metric tons and 100 cubic meters or thereabouts. That’s comparable to a big RV.
Now consider the issue of landing this spacecraft on Mars. Directly from an Earth-to-Mars trajectory involves hitting Mars’s atmosphere at about 5.8 km/s. Mars’s atmosphere is very thin, so even big parachutes won’t slow down an arriving spacecraft very much. So it would have to use retrorockets for the final bit of the trip.
Then there is the expense of the whole project. Current launch costs are around $5000 – $10,000 / kg, into low Earth orbit, so sending up 100 metric tons gives a cost of $ 0.5 – 1.0 billion. Since Mars One involves several habitation modules, the total cost will be even greater. Where is the money supposed to come from? I don’t think that Mars One’s planners have a good answer to that.
Mars One (and done?) | MIT News
Lots of problems:
Excessively high levels of oxygen.
Water-extraction technologies not successfully demonstrated.
Spare-parts resupply — as much as 62% of total resupply.
Will need 15 Falcon Heavy rockets instead of 6.
Launch alone: $4.5 billion.
The colonists will need to consume about 3000 food calories/day, from crops like beans, lettuce, peanuts, potatoes, and rice.
Cropland area: 200 m^2 (0.02 ha) instead of 50 m^2 (0.005 ha).
Cheaper to send food from the Earth. 3D printing still not good enough for a lot of spare parts — those also from the Earth.
Wikipedia’s Comparison of orbital launch systems
Payload to Low Earth Orbit:
Saturn V: 118 metric tons
Falcon Heavy: 53 metric tons
So 1 SF = 2 FH’s
Mars One Feasibility Analysis IAC14.pdf goes into very gory detail about Mars One.
Amphiox #93: Precisely.