Mars Thread

>>7792102
In my humble opinion no they do not. We haven't even landed anything on there yet

>>7792247

You trolling breh?

>>7792102
>There simply is no greater pursuit for humanity.

Nah, it's not a "great pursuit," its a necessity.
existing on multiple planets is crucial to the species' survival

>>7792102
>There simply is no greater pursuit for humanity.
Explain. This seems incredibly childish to me.

File: 1414294846001.jpg (475KB, 800x800px) Image search: [Google]

475KB, 800x800px

>>7792269

It's pretty simple really, it's a shame that so few people realize the urgency that people like Elon Musk and I do...

The demise of this species on this planet is statistically certain, we know the geologic record as well as the asteroid-pocked surfaces of nearby planets and moons.

Sooner or later, a space rock will come along and squish us and perhaps only the most robust of micro-organisms will survive.

We therefore need to establish permanent settlements on other planets to ensure the survival of the species. It's an insurance policy.

We have a short opportunity to do this right now, with industrial civilization. Once advanced societies collapse and Islam takes over the world, the world will revert to medieval like conditions and tribal warfare.

We have to establish a colony before industrial civilization collapses and before the inevitable planetoid intercepts us.

>>7792102
Nobody does

>>7792300

>Sooner or later, a space rock will come along and squish us and perhaps only the most robust of micro-organisms will survive.

That's not in the geologic record. The world has never been knocked back to microorganisms as far as we know, or even back to invertebrates.

>We therefore need to establish permanent settlements on other planets to ensure the survival of the species. It's an insurance policy.

Why? I mean, if everyone's dead, then who cares about the species?

Sure, make tomorrow a better place for our children, yadda yadda, but if everyone on Earth died, what's the point of having a few hundred people on another planet struggling to survive? The universe existed for billions of years without us just fine.

(I do think we should establish a Mars colony, I just don't understand the "survival of the species" argument.)

>>7792263
Where do this shit come from?
What should extinct our species which could be prevented by moving to another planet?
An asteroid? Easier to deflect it given the amount of time doing so would be the time moving the entire population to another planet.
The sun? This would be in half a billion years...

>>7792102
No

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35340734

>>7792740
youre a nihilist and a species-cuck

>>7792858

I've been called worse.

>>7792300
>Elon Musk and I do...

Are you really comparing yourself to a sucessfull bussiness man with a mix of luck and ability?

>>7792740
Because there is a point in every outer colony where it can start to be self sufficient when their infraestructure has grown just enough to overcome the difficulties the enviroment sets. And when we have a space-faring civilization in our hands, it means things like space docks that save a lot of deltaV and lets you create a shit load of spaceships designs for tasks like mining/colonization that would spread humanity and make the event of "total annhilation" less possible.

All throught technology., which we already have but since humanity is stuck in this gravity dwell you have to develop better aerospace technologies firts(spacelevators, SSTOs...)

>>7792785
>What should extinct our species which could be prevented by moving to another planet?

Lack of resources, pollution, war... but I would say mainly the first one. Potassium, and phosphorum are become more and more scarce and we can safely bet that in 100 years humanity will need to find substitutes for entire elements.

>>7792300
This is fairly retarded. To say that we will all die is a certainty regardless of what planet we are on. The universe will die. Our civilization will die and the amount of resources required to colonize another planet will hasten the demise of civilization on our planet. All of this without any certainty that this prohibitively costly endeavor will result in the prolonged survival of the species or in what form it will be in.

>>7792102

The only way anyone is getting to Mars and back ALIVE is if governments up on their space budgets considerably. Corporates aren't going to get there in a million years without government subsidies making their ROI favorable.

>>7793017
That's dumb.

People respond to incentives. When governments throw money at something, companies become efficient at catching that money while doing the absolute minimum of actual work.

Government money makes industries inefficient.

People who talk about needing huge space program budgets think in terms of "established costs". Like it costs about ten million dollars per ton to put stuff in orbit, because that's the kind of money people have spent doing it in the past. That's the cost, it's not going to change, you just have to take it into account. "We tried reusability. It doesn't save money."

It's a complete delusion. Rocket technology is nowhere near maturity. That makes launch costs high and gives flights low availability, so it's very expensive and slow to test anything in space, which means space technology is nowhere near maturity.

And that's largely for lack of serious, good-faith development effort with the primary aim of lowering launch costs. The space shuttle was not performed as a good-faith attempt to lower launch costs. You can see that by the fact that the people involved didn't call for it to be cancelled when it became clear that it wouldn't lower costs. They kept pushing for it after it became obvious that it wouldn't achieve its ostensible goals, that's acting in bad faith, that's corruption.

You can see those sorts of shenanigans all through the rocket industry. The industry has never really allowed free competition, so most people have no idea what it could cost. When they think about inefficiency due to regulation, they think, "Maybe this is twice what it should cost, in a more open market." but not, "This is a thousand times what it should cost, in a more open market."

So no, we don't need governments to throw ten times as much money. That's not one tenth as good as lowering costs a hundredfold.

>>7792300
>We have to establish a colony before industrial civilization collapses and before the inevitable planetoid intercepts us.


1. Checked

2. In due time we will establish colonies on worlds other than our own. It won't happen in our lifetime. Maybe in our grandchildren's lifetimes. Who knows?

>>7792102
What's the deal with Mars One? I can't keep track of it all -- whether it's bullshit or not.

I'm a huge Cody'sLab fan so I'm probably biased, since the last time I checked, he's the number one prospect to be sent to Mars, if and when the mission ever happens.

>>7792858
He has a point though, even the P–Tr event left about 30% of vertebrate still alive so there is no real indication that another similar event will take us back to just micro-organisms. If we got hit by a GRB that was close enough maybe.

>making up dumb reasons to go to mars

We all know deep down you just think it's cool

I do too, that's why I hope we succeed, I don't really care for humanity's survival

Why is there no great pursuit than going to a dead planet where sand colder than ice buffets every inch of your body at all times of the day?

>>7793279
>buffets
You'd actually find it difficult to fly a kite on a breezy Martian sol.

>>7792885
>lack of resources, pollution

Yeah things are a lot better on a planet that has no breathable air or liquid water.

>>7793210
>tfw this kind of farm-boy ingenuity on Mars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yQFnbH10DU

>>7793289
Unless, you know, it's a sandstorm. Which mars has plenty of.

>>7793292
>Yeah things are a lot better on a planet that has no breathable air or liquid water.

Well I wasn't talking about Mars only. Once you get into space you can "easily" go to anywhere, that means mining carbon from Titan or water from Europa for the next thousand of years. This would let humanity sustain a higher population that would result in more scientific/engineering achievements for all(this is just an example, there are more advantages of having high populations while you don't face the problems like resource exhaustion or lack of vital space)

But for Mars, a good stablished colony can develop its own spaceport to extract oxygen from water trapped in the asteroid belt while using their local resources to keep developing their own infraestructure(roads, hauses, more backup systems in case of failure for life support or energy...).

But of course, the initial colony will be unstable and hard to keep on without problems or support from Earth. You don't need to be a genious to know that.

>>7793300
>Unless, you know, it's a sandstorm. Which mars has plenty of.

I don't quite remember the numbers, but since Mars has a lower gravity than Earth(also no-magnetosphere=radiation so kiting on the open might not be a good idea) sandstorms should have less force and be less dangerous(except for the regolith, that shit would penetrate anything but the most hermetic systems), so could you actually... use a kite?

>>7793318
You can't sustain human life when accounting for the shipping costs of bringing water from the asteroid belt to Mars.

>>7793334
>You can't sustain human life when accounting for the shipping costs of bringing water from the asteroid belt to Mars.

based on?

You're in space, you could fart and end up 100.000km further from your original orbit. Also, Mars has a lower gravity so its actually easier to scape or even land and catch orbit(and there is even a thicker atmosphere so less drag). In fact I find more problematic, moving the asteroid than orbiting and deorbiting Mars or the fact that it would take a lot of time(months) but since Im talking about developing space-infraestructure reducing costs/time with scale is exactly the point.

FUCK MARS

WHY DONT WE HAVE A BASE ON THE GOD DAMN MOON?!?

>>7793358

or in Venus for that matter... but I guess that the main reasons are:

-Setting the objective in Mars push a complete agenda for creating the infraestructure for reaching all the bodies in the Solar sistem.

-Mars is rich in heavy metals and is far more habitable than Mercury and you can actually reach those resources unlike Venus

-if you can colonice Mars, you have created the base tools for colonizing other enviroments.(not actual tools, but the "lessons" of space colonization is what Im talking about)

>>7793334
You don't need to ship water to Mars, there's plenty there already. It's just frozen in the ground.

>2010 a NASA radar instrument on an Indian moon probe found evidence of at least 600 million metric tons of water ice spread out on the bottom of craters at the lunar north pole.

One could make a case for shipping water to mars from the moon however.....

>>7792102

Fuck mars. We got enough shit to discover on earth first.

>>7793008

Ok, Elon Musk is retarded for diverting all his energy and resources in such a project.

A basement dweller who masturbates to Chinese doodles and squanders time on shit posting knows better.

Good luck with your existence.

>>7793210
They have raised about $1.1 million in the last five years.

They need about $100 billion in the next 11.

File: Venus.jpg (13KB, 439x336px) Image search: [Google]

13KB, 439x336px

>>7793377
Venus has a nightmarishly deadly surface. Forget about digging a rock tunnel or inflating a shelter or walking around in a suit, a hermetically sealed probe with battleship-level armor will be corroded away into nothing in a matter of hours.

The only way anyone's ever going on the surface of Venus is if we have a massive terraforming process that involves sucking off most of the planet's atmosphere and ejecting it into space.

>>7793469

I was more specifically thinking about the projects for colonizing venus with aerostats in the atmosphere

>>7793449
Appeal to authority nigga

File: 1433085105001.jpg (96KB, 628x676px) Image search: [Google]

96KB, 628x676px

>>7793480

More like an appeal to rationality Mr. Fedora.

mars mission will happen in our life time, if we somehow survive the summer of 2016.
Because shit will hit the fan, there are too many signs that something big will happen this year.

>>7792102
Falling for Elon's marketing scheme. Why do you guys keep doing this? Is it because you identify yourselves with his type of autism?

>>7792102
>There simply is no greater pursuit for humanity than landing on a dead rock just to say to ourselves "we landed on a dead rock once"

how about feeding and clothing the billions of our fellow human beings on this non-dead rock that are currently in extreme poverty you stupid fuck

>>7793500
>how about feeding and clothing the billions of our fellow human beings on this non-dead rock that are currently in extreme poverty you stupid fuck
>Your reply.

A space faring civilization will increase both his technological efficiency and energy explotation. That will result in the improvement for everyone, both in Earth and space.

>>7793500
>ow about feeding and clothing the billions of our fellow human beings on this non-dead rock that are currently in extreme poverty you stupid fuck

Unless you live in India, or one of numerous "nations" on the African continent, you're not living in poverty.

>mfw there are folks living in west virginia who are living in poverty-by-choice

>>7793510
>space faring civilization
A space faring civilization will only deepen Elon' pocket

>>7793500
yes lets stop exploring and give everything to the poor so they can breed even more poor "gibs me dat" shits.

>oh no, pajeet and jamal, look up there, a giant astroide will hit earth and destroy everyone.
>hey whitey, stop that thing.
>what, you cant stop it?
>huh what, whe havent been in space for decades because you used all the money to keep our wellfare running?
>we dont have the tech because we stopped developing it?

Its because of fuckers like you that earth will end up as a tomb for humanity.

>>7793516
>A space faring civilization will only deepen Elon' pocket

>An oil based economy will only deepen Rockefeller's pocket

>A steel based economy will only deepen Carnegie's pocket

>A choo-choo based economy will only deepen Union Pacific's pocket

>>7793427
>One could make a case for shipping water to mars from the moon
Not really, no.

Water on the moon: maybe a little, frozen in the ground in some craters on the poles, where there is never any sunlight (and hence no availability of solar power without running long power lines).

Water on Mars: frozen in the ground pretty much everywhere, frost visible on the surface in some places, traces of water vapor in the atmosphere. You can collect it just by doming over an area of soil, concentrating the sunlight with mirrors or lenses, and sucking up the vapor.

>>7793521
>>A choo-choo based economy will only deepen Union Pacific's pocket

why did this make me laugh

>>7793521
My point exactly

>>7793500

Retarded, vanity-driven cunts like you are why the SJW mind rot and relativistic thinking have mired the collective conscience of society.

>>7793554
I find this post shallow and pedantic

>>7793554

>not this guy again

Christ dude, get the fuck out of the house and go do something productive.

File: feelsbadman.png (225KB, 2400x2400px) Image search: [Google]

225KB, 2400x2400px

Born to soon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6goNzXrmFs

>>7792740
>Why? I mean, if everyone's dead, then who cares about the species?
>Sure, make tomorrow a better place for our children, yadda yadda, but if everyone on Earth died, what's the point of having a few hundred people on another planet struggling to survive? The universe existed for billions of years without us just fine.
The point of life is life.

You are so cucked that even your genes refuse to care about your survival.

>>7793798
Says the cuck that wants other people's gene's to prosper

>>7793210
They started off almost credible.

Then they made a big announcement. Which was a fashion show.

So yeah, definitely a scam.

>>7793358
Politics.
If you have people on Mars, there's no way politicians will ever say "fuck it, let's abandon them".
On the Moon, however, a mission may be scrapped at any time.

My guess is that NASA got a bit paranoid in regards to funding cuts.

>>7793872
There's a hierarchy of propagating your genes.

You don't fight other humans when there's aliens attacking.
You don't fight other tribesmen if another tribe is invading.
You don't fight your family in public.
And you'd rather you spread your genes than your own siblings, but your siblings should spread their genes instead of your neighbor.

I'd rather have a Mars kaliphat than no humans left.

>>7792300
>we know the geologic record as well as the asteroid-pocked surfaces of nearby planets and moons.

1. if the geological record of earth scares you so much why not work to improve earth rather than colonize a new planet? (prevent climate change for example)

2. other planets and moons have those asteroid-pocked surfaces, not earth. you know why? because they have thin atmospheres while earth does not. moving from the planet with a thick, protecting atmosphere to a planet with a thin one is just dangerous, expensive, and unnecessary. studying Mars is great but it can be done just fine with rovers and other useful tools

and Islam taking over the world? please be trolling or go the fuck back to /pol/

>>7793930
>I'd rather have a Mars kaliphat than no humans left.

Do you expect advertising for Elong on Chinese forums is going to put you in his good grace? You expect he is going to invite you on his personal rocket when shit goes down? You don't think he is going to go there alone and make a harem for himself, all the while giving you a big fuck you for supporting him?

>>7792102
>There simply is no greater pursuit for humanity.
Yes there are.
>Does SpaceX have the engineering capability to pull this off?
No they don't.

>>7793957
>Implying I want to live in 0.3g and have my body break down and my future children to be deformed freaks
Stop projecting, spherical lardass.

>>7793975
Dude wtf aren't you OP?

>>7793986
Not everyone who wants Mars settlements is OP.

>>7794004
Could have fooled me with all these mars threads

>>7792785
>The sun? This would be in half a billion years..
Answered you're own question really, the time frame makes no odds, it's a problem we face inevitably

File: 1414296567001.png (11KB, 412x406px) Image search: [Google]

11KB, 412x406px

>>7793941
>if the geological record of earth scares you so much why not work to improve earth rather than colonize a new planet? (prevent climate change for example)

Because a planetoid will make all of the work in vain.

>2. other planets and moons have those asteroid-pocked surfaces, not earth. you know why? because they have thin atmospheres while earth does not.

And the atmosphere is capable of burning up only rocks up to a very limited mass, NASA claims everything larger than 25 m in diameter reaches the surface.

Something larger than 1 km in diameter will most definitely not be reduced in the atmosphere..

Man, I thought this place was supposed to have fewer retards than /pol/ and /r9k/...

>>7792785
>What should extinct our species which could be prevented by moving to another planet?

No one is suggesting moving the Earth population to Mars.

We want to transplant life onto Mars in case the inhabitants of Earth get wiped out or start worshiping Islam.

>>7794081
>Man, I thought this place was supposed to have fewer retards than /pol/ and /r9k/...
You need less than an hour to realize that /sci/ is just another crackpot board like /v/ and /pol/.

File: 1449353939429.jpg (29KB, 626x720px) Image search: [Google]

29KB, 626x720px

Quit playin OP. We all know you want a Mars colony because "DUDE SPACE LMAO"

>>7794165
>DUDE NOFUN LMAO

>>7792102
They would get there and just as they are landing the leg would fall off and they would explode (but the engine will be fine so its ok)

>>7792300
This is hella retarded, but ignoring most of it, why do you think that landing on Mars = establishing a permanent colony on Mars. Moreover why do you think a meme company like SpaceX, a company whose track record so far includes occasionally launching rockets 400km up and running hype trains, would be the company (or organisation) to do it.

>>7794831
>SpaceX

I don't think it's not as much about spaceX, but rather the liberalization and accesibility of the aerospace sector to rich people and not only the goverment. If this can become a bussiness, costs will go down, more people will enter and will start making the so much needed infraestructure .

Of course, I know it's not exactly an easy task or something you can compare to the colonization of America in the XVI century. But mothern bussiness is not formed by primitive merchants either, so it might actually be a possibility that is actually much better than "increase NASA funding please"

>>7793473

You'd have to bring your own water. Mars doesn't have this obstacle.

>>7794831
>why do you think that landing on Mars = establishing a permanent colony on Mars
No him but anyway: once you land on Mars it is very impractical to leave. The atmosphere is thin but represents still substantial drag and the gravity well is deep enough to require a lot of fuel to get off, fuel you would have had to bring with you if the plan was to leave.

There have been plans involving shipping a complete chemical factory to generate fuel for the return journey to Mars ahead of the astronauts but given the lousy success rate of Mars probes this would probably have ended in failure.

So either we go for robotic missions to Mars or we go for one way tickets for astronauts. Unless you want to engineer the costliest suicide pact in history you'd better aim for a permanent colony.

>>7792102
The engineering has been here since the late 1960's.
It is really about the costs, and the public acceptance of the loss of life at such an outpost
Mars is not some almost Earth I keep hearing about, look at it's size, It's gravity, it's lack of a magnetic field, it is very inhospitable to our type of life, very little to no water, no atmosphere, very low surface temperature, a research outpost, perhaps, a place for mankind to survive, nope.

If mankind wants to survive away from Earth and possibly colonize other worlds, then the future of humanity really depends on genetic engineering. Elon Musk wants to terra-form Mars, imagine the cost and the amount of time necessary, mankind will be gone before it could be achieved, remember Mars has no soil, all dirt on Earth was once something that was alive.
The only way for humans to survive long term in space or on other worlds is for us to genetically change our children to adapt to whatever we find rather than adapting what we find to our present form
To survive, we have to change, adapt, that has been the recipe for all successful species on Earth so far, we have the ability to continue this success, but do we have the will

>>7792247
Haven't you seen that movie with Matt Damon? Or are you just trolling?

>>7795751
>once you land on Mars it is very impractical to leave.

Yeah, it'd be much more practical to establish a permanent colony there, with no tangible benefit in either the long or short term.

>disdain_for_plebeians.jpg

>>7793469
Large enough Hydrogen bombs exploding in the upper atmosphere, 100 mega tons each, would blow out a good portion of the atmosphere

A human at Venus's surface would move through the atmosphere like you were deep underwater on Earth

>>7795751
>doesn't know delta-V values for anything
>doesn't know about the sabatier reaction

Please share more of your wisdom with us, oh great one.

Mars is the perfect place to establish a new Western civilization.

Another problem with getting to Mars is at present we have maxed out the size of payloads we can successfully land.

http://www.universetoday.com/7024/the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet/

http://www.wired.com/2011/11/landing-on-mars/

>>7795980
I wish Mars One wasn't a scam.
Their idea was pretty decent - Send waves of objects.
First habitats with robots to assemble them.
Then a redundant set of habitats.
Then a bunch of humans with their own habitat for triple redundancy.
And then send a few humans as well as a habitat every year and a bunch of redundant habitats as an occasional addition.

Twenty years later you have the first Mars village and people are starting to get comfy and figuring out the kinks of what does and doesn't work on Mars, allowing the newer shipments of habitats to be adjusted appropriately.
They could also start making their own resources at that point if there's enough stuff on Mars.

>>7793526
>he wants to stop big choo choo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ11SH16MMQ

>this video isn't satirical ;_;

>>7795933
Except the cost solely exists as a function of government subsidies
You had NASA who existed mostly as a makework organization, and defense contractors who get paid in "cost plus" contracts.

File: 2016-01-19_162222.png (42KB, 956x711px) Image search: [Google]

42KB, 956x711px

>>7792785
it's quite arrogant to believe we can prevent any kind of mass extinction event

File: Opportunity on meth.jpg (2MB, 3274x3070px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 3274x3070px

>>7792247
>We haven't even landed anything on there yet

shiggiddity

>>7792269
exploring is ingrained in our dna. It helps us evolve and make greater achievements

>>7795050
You proved you are retarded because of the following:

>using XVI instead of 16th century in a bad attempt to sound intellectual

>mothern..... its spelled modern

File: morpheus.jpg (133KB, 1011x760px) Image search: [Google]

133KB, 1011x760px

Isn't prolonging the active part of the human lifespan more efficient at this point?

Massive resources are lost daily due to educated, skilled and experienced adults either dying from diseases or accidents or simply growing useless from aging and their body decaying.

It's highly unlikely that a catastrophic event from outer space will destroy our planet or make it uninhabitable in the next few centuries. So while we need the resources from Mars to scale our progress linearly, we could increase our progress in an exponential fashion simply by adding another 10 active years to the average persons life.

>>7796584
Just nuke it from orbit how hard can it be

>>7797610
It's "Bruce Willis needs to drill a hole in an asteroid with a team of rednecks and half-assed equipment"-hard

> There simply is no greater pursuit for humanity.

Wrong. Spending at least $500 billion to get to Mars is the very definition of waste. Humanity will never colonize Mars, since Humanity has a mental operating system that runs on economics, and the economics of a Mars adventure are 100% lossy.

>>7795998

The bigger scam is planetary chauvinism. Economically speaking, when you get OUT of a gravity well as deep as Earth or Mars, you will NOT just go back down another one. You'd STAY in space and make use of asteroids and comets to construct O'Neill or Bernal styles of habitats.

Sadly, the same economics that dictate that, also dictate that leaving the gravity well in the first place won't be done.

Economics is the physics of Human behavior. Humans ALWAYS behave in economic ways. That's how I know we'll never colonize Mars.

>>7797607
This is a fair point, although really physical work is fairly unimportant and we'd probably gain more from an all-purpose intelligence boost than prolonging our limited intelligence a little longer.

Like, we'd probably be better off if everyone could master our current understanding of physics by grade 8 with ease.

>>7797679
>Economics is the physics of Human behavior. Humans ALWAYS behave in economic ways. That's how I know we'll never colonize Mars.
Economics is the physics of market behaviour. That just means that the market will never take us to Mars, much like it didn't take us to the Americas or Australia. We still got to the Americas and Australia.

>>7797672
you seem to think that a human colony on mars, whether or not it's 100% independent of the human colony on Earth, wouldn't run on economics either.

>>7797705
>Economics is the physics of market behaviour.

Market behavior elements are still HUMANS.

We went to the Americans and Australia since it paid to go there. Transit over land and sea is about 1000 times cheaper than transit up out of a gravity well.

>>7797716

Bother to make a point. Economics dictates that we won't make the "investment" in a Mars colony. There's nothing such a colony could return to us on our investment, hence it's not an investment, but a pure LOSS. That's why we HAVEN'T done it, and it's why we WON'T do it.

The "space race" was pure theater for scaring the subjects of two major world empires into submitting before high taxes and oppressive government. That theater isn't needed anymore, since one of those empires (the USSR) collapsed, and the other empire (the USA) found that its subjects became too cowed to require theater to scare or entertain them into accepting taxation and oppression.

>>7797679
>Humans ALWAYS behave in economic ways.
I buy some of my electronics as cheaply as possible and some as expensive as viable and I'd never get a subscription outside of high quality magazines. Which don't exist anymore because economic theory.

I break the economic model that assumes that everyone will just buy the cheapest shit and subscriptions aren't evil.

>>7797765
>Market behavior elements are still HUMANS.
Yes.
And an insular group of humans will not behave like a market.
People on Mars wouldn't have any proper kind of currency.

Getting to Mars will equally become possible, once rockets are affordable for people who aren't insanely rich. People who actually have heart and visions.

>>7797769
>There's nothing such a colony could return to us on our investment
You mean outside of spiritual factors and entertainment?

Are you telling me that Scientology isn't making money?

>>7797769
>There's nothing such a colony could return to us on our investment,
Oh, bullshit. Most of trade today isn't heavy physical cargo. Energy-intensive, high specific value products like microchips and high-efficiency photovoltaic panels could be profitably exported from Mars to Earth.

Mars is a frozen world without flowing water, with no biosphere to worry about, where everyone who goes outside has to wear a spacesuit. It's a good place for nuclear-powered industry (as long as waste is buried, even a few feet down, it shouldn't go anywhere, and if it does, it's not a big deal), and a good jumping-off point for deep space exploitation.

It makes sense to develop the moon first, but Mars is also a reasonable site. Unlike the moon, none of the material from big nuclear fuck-ups could reach the Earth, so we could perhaps make industrial use of thermonuclear detonations, our only established technology of energy-positive fusion power.

>>7792102
yes, they do have the know-how. What they don't have is the funding.

Elon wants to provide the transport to and from Mars, while NASA and other government agencies provide the payloads. And he wants to do an architecture that is cheaper than SLS: multiple smaller launches assembling and fueling a craft in orbit that then takes the journey to Mars.

>>7794081
reaching the surface or not, if you're worried about asteroids, why the fuck are you moving to a more dangerous planet?! Also planetoids are far too rare to be your first concern, Mars is more likely to be desecrated by an asteroid than Earth. Call me a retard instead of refuting my points, that's fine, that proves me right

>>7795948
>Yeah, it'd be much more practical to establish a permanent colony there
Your words. reality is that it is far more practical to use robot missions for the forseeable future. Perhaps in 50 years it will be practical to send humans to Mars. Perhaps.


>>7795956
>>doesn't know about the sabatier reaction
>Please share more of your wisdom with us, oh great one.
I am familiar with Sabatier reaction; after all this is what was meant to produce fuel for the return mission. I really thought that was well known on /sci/. What should be equally well known is the huge failure rate for Mars missions. The chances of the fuel mission and the manned mission both working to plan is practically zero. Hence it is an all paid for suicide mission.

>>7798029
>What should be equally well known is the huge failure rate for Mars missions.
Isn't a significant portion of the failures from fuckups with the robots/communication to earth?
That's an error source that wouldn't exist in quite the same way with humans.

Also, the best possible Mars outcome would be a one-way trip. That way no one can pussy out.
In that regard, it would be definite "suicide", but only about the same as becoming a soldier.

>>7798029
>the huge failure rate for Mars missions
The huge failure rate for first tries with no practice run or testing under field conditions.

Orbital launch is so expensive that only a few probes can be sent. If you can only send a few probes, you want each one to do a different thing, with the latest and greatest technology to get the most out of each launch If each one does a different thing, with new technology, you're trying to do something you haven't done before, haven't tested under realistic conditions, have no real experience with.

This wouldn't apply to a massive operation with standardized vehicles, particularly with drastically reduced launch costs (which would allow more experimentation and testing, and which would result from a dramatically increased demand for launch, which would justify development of low cost efficiently reusable vehicles). They'd have early failures, then they'd work the bugs out, and the failure rate would drop until the things they were doing routinely were almost perfectly reliable.

>>7797772
>And an insular group of humans will not behave like a market.

And such a group of Humans don't command the capital required to colonize Mars.

Checkmate. Humans put controls on other Humans. In the aggregate, Humans act with great precision within the laws of economics. They do nothing else.

>>7798270
>And such a group of Humans don't command the capital required to colonize Mars.
I'm saying that the people on Mars don't give a fuck about money. Within the group, they'll work in the assumption that everyone helps everyone else anyway, until they reach the 1000 or so people mark.
.
This would have interesting results on the price of upkeep of a Mars mission.
Would those people hold scientific data ransom when they think that earth is fucking them over? Would they exchange the data for supplies? Would they find something else to get stuff from earth? Maybe a soil return mission?
I wonder if they'd prevent any attempts at sending further probes up there, forcing all future endeavors to go through them and pay some kind of material toll.
I bet their first goal would be to go self-sufficient, so that they won't have to rely on earth for everything. This lessens the financial upkeep of the Mars mission massively.

>They do nothing else.
Yeah, sure. And my grandma tells me to pay every meal she makes for me.

>>7798306
>I'm saying that the people on Mars don't give a fuck about money.

Yes, I understood that, and you need to understand that you don't care about money either once you are magically put into a condition that capital normally isn't expended for.

Getting to Mars is a HIGHLY uneconomic exercise. Its cost is so much higher than a reinvention of the Apollo Program, or an expansion of the ISS, that it's pretty much impossibly to achieve. Human economic models simply don't permit it to happen.

Get it? You can't get there. There just isn't enough stupid money available to get you there, so that you can then turn around and thumb your nose at Earth. Nobody with power and money wants to use that power and expend tat money in order to get a pack of you virgin-nerds and your metric tons of Cheetos{tm} to Mars so that you can sit around and make a new masturbatory Internet on Mars.

>>7798306
>And my grandma tells me to pay every meal she makes for me.

Confusing macro-ec with micro-ec is a truly sophomoric mistake. Do you seriously believe that peoples and their nations actually act like families? Get fucked if you do. Peoples and nations (i.e. those with the sheer capital resources needed to make a Mars colony) act in 100.000% accordance with harsh economic law.

>>7798326
You are implying that there are no rich people who want to see a Mars colony for whatever reason.

We already have Elon Musk and he did good work on making a Mars mission more economically viable.

Get a few more Musks and a bit of government backing and it won't be an issue.

>>7798270
>In the aggregate, Humans act with great precision within the laws of economics. They do nothing else.
Oh bullshit. Total, ridiculous bullshit.

Economics is a pseudoscience with very poor predictive power.

>>7798344
also, rational economics is not a good model for our most expensive space achievements. The pioneering achievements up to the moon landing were due to paranoia and fear during the Cold War. The Shuttle and ESA's Ariane as it was implemented was entirely due to politics, spreading the pork to all member parties. The ISS as implemented was intended to soak up the Russian space industry so they wouldn't drift to unstable parties like Iran and NK. And SLS is back to pork spreading.

It is amazing to me that SpaceX is the very first launch provider driven by market forces to make their product less expensive.

>>7798436
>It is amazing to me that SpaceX is the very first launch provider driven by market forces to make their product less expensive.
SpaceX isn't driven by market forces. It's the idealistic hobby of a billionaire.

File: bluahhhhh.png (337KB, 650x676px) Image search: [Google]

337KB, 650x676px

>>7792102
Mars has no shields.

Unless you've got some kind of JJ Gaybrums maguffin to kickstart the core and get the shields back on line, enjoy your deathtrap.

Even if you do, the planet doesn't have enough gravity to keep it from geologically ripping itself a new asshole, i.e. -Olympus Mons.

>>7798769
The Martian atmosphere is thick enough to stop the lower-energy protons from the sun. It's the cosmic rays which can reach the Mars surface, making the radiation somewhat worse than during stratospheric flight on Earth, and almost as bad as in low-Earth orbit.

However, this radiation can be stopped by moderately thick shielding on the roof, and significantly reduced by relatively thin shielding.

As long as your build your habitat appropriately and spend most of your time indoors, you'll be fine.

File: The-Driest-Place-on-Earth-Atacama-Desert-2.jpg (62KB, 640x480px) Image search: [Google]

62KB, 640x480px

If you want the mars experience, go to the Atacama desert. Traveling to mars is a huge waste of time and money.

>>7798756
?
Except it's already a very profitable business and will probably turn into a huge multi-billion dollar company in a couple years.

>>7797765
>We went to the Americans and Australia since it paid to go there.
Um. People left everything they had bar what they could carry to get <sweet fuck all> on arrival, where they would be fending for themselves in a relatively lawless, undeveloped shithole. Also if we're talking about individuals you have to acknowledge that often people make 'irrational' financial decisions because of grave personal biases. This makes things that aren't worth it to most people worth it to others.

>>7798921
To be fair, that's because space has been done in military contracts up until now.
The fact that Falcons are so cheap is just a random side effect of being a space company that actually has to care about money.

The idealistic part is the re-flying of the rockets.

>>7798988
You are talking to an economy believer.
They aren't the most sane folks.

Most of them went into economics because real science was too hard for them and they wanted quick bucks.

File: fuck_fireworks_by_cakebandit-d499s34.jpg (320KB, 890x890px) Image search: [Google]

320KB, 890x890px

>>7792247
>We haven't even landed anything on there yet

>>7799595
No, reflying first stages is a bold attempt to reduce launch prices by reusing the most expensive piece. And unlike the Shuttle, the first stage and engines have been designed for quick reuse from day one.

Granted, it is still an open question whether it really is cheaper to refly the stages. But even if that fails to close, just getting the first stage hardware back for analysis will allow engineering feedback which will increase the system reliability and efficiency.

>>7798921
>Except it's already a very profitable business
No, SpaceX is still running on investment money (they've had well over a billion dollars in investments in the last couple of years). Not to mention the sweetheart subsidy contracts from NASA, and now the Air Force.

When SpaceX people claim it's a profitable business, they're talking about operating expenses vs. revenue. Nevermind the capital investments or liabilities.

See, when they sign a launch contract, they get paid right then. That's money in their pocket. But they haven't launched anything yet. The requirement to launch is a liability.

Since they've been selling contracts faster than they've been launching, the only way they'll ever clear that liability off their books is to expand their operations, increase their launch rate. Nobody knows for sure what that'll cost or whether they can even achieve it. For instance, they just had to go half a year without any launches at all, and came back with a more expensive launch vehicle to prevent a repeat of their loss.

They're in debt by a large number of launches. Because the debt is owed in launches, it's hard to put a dollar figure on it, so it's easy to pretend they're making money.

>>7798046
Nope, there are all sorts of failure modes including cases where they are not certain what went wrong. Wikipedia has a list of Mars failures. The "Mars Defence Forces" have been successful in shooting down probes, they say.

As for soldiers I didn't know that was a suicide occupation. What country is this? I did national service and saw no fatalities.

>>7798106
>no practice run or testing under field conditions
The first human mission would have a bleak prospect then. The first mission will be the first mission. There is no try.

>This wouldn't apply to a massive operation with standardized vehicles
We are nowhere near standardized vehicles so that will be decades away.


>>7798769
>Even if you do, the planet doesn't have enough gravity to keep it from geologically ripping itself a new asshole, i.e. -Olympus Mons.
Which geological theory is that??

>>7800183
>As for soldiers I didn't know that was a suicide occupation. What country is this? I did national service and saw no fatalities.
Obviously not in peace times. But whenever conflict is even likely, becoming a soldier becomes kind of dangerous.

Remember, human wave tactics actually exist.

>>7800183
>>no practice run or testing under field conditions
>The first human mission would have a bleak prospect then. The first mission will be the first mission. There is no try.
Oh, bullshit. You can practice and test everything you need for manned missions without actually putting humans onboard.

There's no major difference between transporting pressurized cargo and transporting humans, except life support.

Life-support-specific systems can be tested on Earth or in LEO, where the crew can be returned promptly in the event of a failure. Radiation shielding can be tested in places like an Earth-Moon lagrange point, or by passing through the van allen belts.

Landers can be established by shipping cargo, and habitats can be set up and tested by teleoperation years in advance of human arrival. We can start on this any time now, and have men on Mars in five years.

>>This wouldn't apply to a massive operation with standardized vehicles
>We are nowhere near standardized vehicles so that will be decades away.
Uh... that's not how it works. You have standardized vehicles as soon as you decide to reuse designs once they work.

We could build our whole Mars base infrastructure around SpaceX's Dragon V2, launched by Falcon Heavy, for instance. They could make a variant for unpressurized cargo, with sides that fold down as ramps for easy deployment, and one for pressurized cargo or crew.

File: 1448812572071.gif (2MB, 303x277px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 303x277px

>>7796295
>tfw work in construction equipment rental in fl
>tfw was on the all aboard florida jobsite earlier today
>tfw we have raked in $150k from that jobsite in the last few months

I'm all about all aboard Florida.

>>7792740
>everyone's dead
>having a few hundreds of people on another planet

Choose one

drop genetically engineered lichen on mars, along with scores and scores of payloads of critical materials (steel, aluminum, plastics, carbon fiber, etc). after a 100 years, we might have enough ecological capital on the planet that people would feel comfortable staying there. i dont want to die cause a gasket breaks on a dome and i dont have the means to repair it

>>7792102
AI and machine learning is the greatest pursuit.

>>7800078
>Not to mention the sweetheart subsidy contracts from NASA, and now the Air Force.
sweetheart subsidy contracts which are probably less than they were paying whoever else was doing their launches.

So its in fact, not a subsidy at all.

>>7801538
>probably less than they were paying whoever else was doing their launches.
Sure, for a somewhat less capable, far less timely vehicle. When you consider the long delays, loss of cargo, and low volume capacity of Dragon, NASA hasn't saved any money using SpaceX to resupply the ISS, and they've doubled and tripled down on subsidizing SpaceX with commercial crew and second wave of resupply.

Anyway, I was referring more to the development contracts. NASA paid for the Dragon and Falcon 9 development. Officially they only paid for the Dragon development, but the contract was so generous that SpaceX's profit was more than enough to pay for Falcon 9. SpaceX is now also getting subsidies from the Air Force for developing their new Raptor engine.

SpaceX was being subsidized from day 1. You think you could go and launch from Omelek Island? That's a US military holding. Falcon 1 happened because of a minor military program to expand launch options beyond the ULA monopoly. The engine design was lifted straight from the NASA Fastrac program.

If you had some people together who could do everything as well as SpaceX, you would not even come close to being able to compete with SpaceX because it's so heavily subsidized. You'd have to get your nose in the same troughs to stand a chance.

>>7801311
I think that was the setup for Red Mars, one of the best novels about Mars colonization.

>>7802120
there is another way to look at it.

SpaceX did indeed manage to get a lot of government money to fund development. (Same for Tesla and Solar City, for that matter.) But then again, if it were that easy, why did no other players make a play for the same funds to develop cheaper launch capability? You have to give credit to SpaceX for at least trying, even though ULA and Orbital originally held the high ground. Now all the major players are scrambling to make a cheaper launch architecture (ULA's Vulcan, ESA's Ariane 6, Russia's Angara, China's new kerosene family of Long March) just to stay relevant in the era of SpaceX cheap launchers.

>>7802198
>if it were that easy, why did no other players make a play for the same funds to develop cheaper launch capability?
Other players did make a play for the same funds. There have been many such bids and proposals.

Winning in the arena of government funding, and winning in the arena of the free market, are very different things.

>>7802260
I like SpaceX, but it's clearly as much an unofficial branch of the US government as ULA is.

Factions in the US government are fostering new rocket companies as a way of cleaning out the dead wood of the old ones, focusing on long-term efficiency and results rather than the attitude toward US aerospace that has prevailed since the 70s, which is that it should be a jobs program and way to funnel money to contractors.

SpaceX is happening because some people in the US government want to kill off or severely diminish ULA (the main launch provider) and the Marshall Space Flight Center (which is responsible for NASA's in-house vehicles, like the shuttle and SLS), which are old, corrupt, and inefficient.

The fact that private money and ostensibly private ownership are involved isn't unusual for a major endeavor of the US government, which is "capitalist" in the sense that productive assets should be privately owned, even if they are managed by the state in excruciating detail, supported by tax money, and attached to exclusive government properties.

>>7800275
>You can practice and test everything you need for manned missions without actually putting humans onboard.
Wrong. In a manned mission you have humans making the decisions, that is the purpose of having humans on board rather than yet another robot mission.

File: KSR_1.jpg (113KB, 602x1018px) Image search: [Google]

113KB, 602x1018px

>>7792102
Not yet. But they are getting there. The good thing about Mars is that using nuclear power is not a problem when everything is a deadly wasteland anyways. It's also smaller, allowing for less thrust to be used to escape it.

But if SpaceX doesn't do space colonization first, it will likely end up being done by the UN just as in the book.

>>7804051
>Wrong. In a manned mission you have humans making the decisions, that is the purpose of having humans on board
I suppose that's why the humans onboard have actively piloted every ascending manned orbital launcher? What garbage.

There are many possible jobs for humans on a mission without having them in charge of everything, especially things critical to their own survival. Modern versions of the Apollo missions could have humans along just to plant a flag and pick up some rocks. They weren't along for much else in the actual ones, although they were assigned a few of the piloting chores that looked easy enough for a human to learn.

The actual space transportation and basic survival business can be, and mostly has to be, handled like a robotic mission, while the humans come along to build, repair, install, and analyse things which are not essential to their own survival and eventual safe return.

>>7804135
Yeah, when do we get a worldwide space federation? Up to now, space endeavors have been used as a national prestige item, to prove you are a world power.

The closest thing we have at the moment is ESA, representing the European nations (but heavy on France). But everything else is per nation (US, Russia, China, Japan, India). That six-fold effort is wasteful.

>>7804291
>when do we get a worldwide space federation?
More importantly, when do we get a worldwide space wrestling federation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjMrvNnz7kc&t=255

>>7804235
>Has not heard that the moon landing required human intervention to avoid rocks.

What garbage.

>>7804516
> the moon landing required human intervention to avoid rocks.
So how do you suppose the unmanned moon landers worked?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9
February 3, 1966 - The USSR soft-lands an unmanned probe on the moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveyor_1
June 2, 1966 - NASA soft-lands an unmanned probe on the moon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_16
1970 - The USSR gathers and returns a sample of lunar soil using an unmanned probe.

The need for the piloting skills of the astronauts was a narrative, a fairy tale. It's part of the story that manned-space-program advocates tell when they want to pretend that there is more than symbolic or scientific significance to putting men in space briefly without the means of living independent of Earth.

File: NWO.jpg (1MB, 2017x1307px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 2017x1307px

If we had a communist world govenrment maybe

>>7792102
Is it important? Yes.

Is it possible right now? No.

Unfortunate, but I think we're at the most optimistic a generation too early to see humans make a colony on Mars. I'm certain we will, so long as no fool decides to start nuclear Armageddon.

File: Palace_Of_Soviets_2.jpg (783KB, 1280x1024px) Image search: [Google]

783KB, 1280x1024px

>>7804605
Star Trek when?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55vZvYdjX70

>>7793533
Lol gtfo
Such a dense motherfucker

>>7804581
>The need for the piloting skills of the astronauts was a narrative, a fairy tale.
Source, please?

Anyway some kinds of landings that would work well for robots would not work for humans. One example is the balloon landing on Mars where the lander is covered in balloons acting as buffers since the landing is pretty much bumping like a rubber ball until it settles somewhere.

>>7804794
>>The need for the piloting skills of the astronauts was a narrative, a fairy tale.
>Source, please?
Jesus Christ, I just gave you three examples of soft landings on the moon without a pilot, two of which happened before the first manned landing, and one of which accomplished an overall mission of similar scientific value to a manned moon landing.

Are you completely incapable of reasoning for yourself?

>>7793485
'Kek

>>7805082
>three examples
About 5 seconds googling shows a Wiki list of moon landings with plenty of failures. You are cherry picking and extrapolates from that.

You claim the piloting skills were unnecessary, You still need to prove that.

>>7804291
Because politics.

File: 1452907071002.png (89KB, 353x332px) Image search: [Google]

89KB, 353x332px

>>7804135

Anyone read blue Mars here?

I got to the second book and I'm questioning if I should bother with the final, third one.

>>7806838
>You claim the piloting skills were unnecessary, You still need to prove that.
Do you even know what the word "necessary" means? Here's a tip: it doesn't mean "helpful" or "supplementary".

If you can do something once without a thing, that proves the thing isn't necessary to the task.