<story><title>Elon Musk argues that putting a million people on Mars ensures humanity&apos;s future</title><url>http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danatkinson</author><text>Why do you think it&amp;#x27;ll be hard? I&amp;#x27;m not saying it&amp;#x27;s going to be easy, but what difficult challenges to survival do you specifically think they&amp;#x27;ll struggle to overcome?</text></item><item><author>mendort</author><text>I suspect that once we see how hard it is to build a self-sustaining extra terrestrial colony, we&amp;#x27;ll come to appreciate what we have even more.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Every time that this argument is made, I can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder if the mere existence of a sustainable off-world colony would cause humans on Earth to give even less of a damn about maintaining a habitable planet. A sort of moral hazard (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Moral_hazard&lt;/a&gt;) on an interplanetary scale. Which is to ask, could colonizing other worlds actually accelerate the destruction of human civilization, rather than ensure it?&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn&amp;#x27;t. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemo</author><text>There are enough places on Earth that was can barely manage to survive without major supporting infrastructure.  Those places have the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and Earth gravity.  Mars has a far more brutal climate (with a more elliptic orbit creating a more dramatic range through the Martian year), no breathable air, and a weaker gravity.&lt;p&gt;The weak gravity is the real killer, colonists bones would decay, the calcium would leach into the bloodstream causing serious health issues.  Muscles would atrophy.  The colonists&amp;#x27; sense of balance and motion, evolved to Earth gravity, would be constantly disorienting.  Low gravity has a lot of negative health effects.&lt;p&gt;Mars also has nothing like the Van Allen belt, it&amp;#x27;s bombarded with radiation that colonists would constantly need to be shielded from.&lt;p&gt;Mar&amp;#x27;s atmosphere is poisonous to humans, and has a much lower atmospheric pressure, so colonists would need to have a constant protective bubble protecting them from the world they were on.&lt;p&gt;Mars hasn&amp;#x27;t got liquid water.  There is water there, but it would require a lot of energy to get it to the point of being usable.&lt;p&gt;Energy is another issue.  Solar energy could provide some energy, though it&amp;#x27;d be massively expensive to get enough arrays to support a colony with the required infrastructure.  In theory they could create some kind of nuclear energy plant, though the logistics of transporting that to Mars and maintaining it are staggering.&lt;p&gt;The psychological impact of taking an animal evolved to live in Earth conditions and put them in a completely inhospitable environment deeply dependent on a very complex and expensive infrastructure, with disorienting gravity, health decay, very limited variety in food, and other likely spartan living conditions a Mars colony would be completely hellish for most.&lt;p&gt;There may be ways to manage these problems, but the millions of dollars spent per colonist to get them there along with the millions spent per colonist to sustain them are a pretty serious impediment.  A colony would need to ultimately be economically independent to make it worthwhile.  Mars has some resources that might be valuable to Earth, but whether they&amp;#x27;d be viable to support a colony needing such an expensive infrastructure to survive isn&amp;#x27;t a guarantee.  Would humanity be willing to pour trillions upon trillions into a Mars experiment in the hope that the experiment might work?</text></comment>
<story><title>Elon Musk argues that putting a million people on Mars ensures humanity&apos;s future</title><url>http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danatkinson</author><text>Why do you think it&amp;#x27;ll be hard? I&amp;#x27;m not saying it&amp;#x27;s going to be easy, but what difficult challenges to survival do you specifically think they&amp;#x27;ll struggle to overcome?</text></item><item><author>mendort</author><text>I suspect that once we see how hard it is to build a self-sustaining extra terrestrial colony, we&amp;#x27;ll come to appreciate what we have even more.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>Every time that this argument is made, I can&amp;#x27;t help but wonder if the mere existence of a sustainable off-world colony would cause humans on Earth to give even less of a damn about maintaining a habitable planet. A sort of moral hazard (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Moral_hazard&lt;/a&gt;) on an interplanetary scale. Which is to ask, could colonizing other worlds actually accelerate the destruction of human civilization, rather than ensure it?&lt;p&gt;As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn&amp;#x27;t. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mendort</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think living on mars will be that hard.  I think building the large industrial base required to extract resources and manufacture the equipment required to live on mars will be very difficult (read expensive and slow).&lt;p&gt;It may, in fact, require more resources for one person to live on mars than one person can produce with our current (or near future) level of technology.&lt;p&gt;I think just building the energy infrastructure to do energy expensive things like make steel or silicon ingots will be very difficult.  Not to mention that there is no source of petroleum on mars, so plastics are going to have to synthesized using other materials.   The difficulties are legion once you get down to the details.</text></comment>