> until we have solved our problems here, Mars is just a distraction for a few escapists, and so worse than useless.
The problem with this attitude is that there is no evidence that we will ever completely solve our problems on earth. There is always going to be something threatening us even if it's mainly ourselves. Also, it's the same philosophy critics of the space race espoused yet many of the tools we use to identify and track our global problems are an unintended outgrowth of that great power contest, e.g. climate sensing satellites. It's a deeply inspiring effort to colonize another planet and far from an "escapist" activity it's something which gives many people hope for the future. It's much easier to be an "escapist" by dabbling in distractions on earth than it is by building rockets or working on the science to make life possible on Mars! Sure, the endeavor shouldn't be a major global economic line item in the meantime but I'm not aware of the necessity to go that far.
we have important potentially civilization destroying or, in some models, extinction level problems coming at us in the relative short terms. That is to say that I don't think he means we need to fix every problem on earth before going to Mars, but that trying to set up Mars colonies or similar escapades while not dealing with climate change would be useless because whatever we built in that short term on Mars is going to need extensive support from something here.
Could you elaborate on the extinction-level problems? I hear this a lot, but it's almost always nonspecific and hand-wavy. Do you mean the potential mass release of hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere, or a runaway effect increasing CO2 levels to deadly amounts, or something else?
Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there.
The most likely final outcome of full-flowered climate catastrophe is global thermonuclear war. Before that happens, we will probably have two billion people starve. After, another five billion. The ocean will cease to be a reliable source of protein, and whatever sea life survives acidification will be fished out at an increasingly frantic pace.
In the hydrogen sulfide upwell scenario, the survival of humanity in any quantity seems unlikely. I'm just a layman, hopefully experts can tell me why this won't happen:
>The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the End-Permian Extinction and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 251.9 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with the extinction of 57% of biological families, 83% of genera, 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.
>Possible causes supported by strong evidence appear to describe a sequence of catastrophes, each worse than the last: the Siberian Traps eruptions were bad enough alone, but because they occurred near coal beds and the continental shelf, they also triggered very large releases of carbon dioxide and methane. The resultant global warming may have caused perhaps the most severe anoxic event in the oceans' history: according to this theory, the oceans became so anoxic, anaerobic sulfur-reducing organisms dominated the chemistry of the oceans and caused massive emissions of toxic hydrogen sulfide.
According to this hypothesis which is well-supported by the archaeological evidence, it took Earth's atmosphere between hundreds of thousands to millions of years to return to conditions capable of supporting much life. That's a long time for biodomes, bunkers, and orbital stations not to break in irreparable ways.
We don't know that nobody does. We don't even know that the US doesn't. Putin could have one, and China, Israel, England, and France seem likely. Japan and India are possible. North Korea? Iceland, if they could afford to dig one, wouldn't need the nuke. Peru might have inherited one from deep time. Egypt, likewise. Turkey has lots of underground cities already dug that mainly only need wiring.
Mass murder will begin well before 7 billion starve. We can slash global emissions using weapons without affecting our lives too much. I’m surprised this isn’t discussed more.
I mean China is one of the countries with weapons and probably the most likely place you would want to decrease emissions if you were in the West and didn't want to decrease your own. So there's no way that would go well.
Which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and probably Iran and Japan soon. Any one country could reach for the nukes first, or any small group could attempt a Sum of All Fears scenario.
> Probably no matter what happens, unless the cobalt bombs go off, a few million people will survive, here and there.
Arguably that’d at least be a “human society extinction” event.
I find cities of less than about 5 million people uninteresting in terms of having enough of the entertainment and eating out options I enjoy.
A planet with a few million people scattered here and there would be incapable of much more than early industrial revolution technology I suspect. I can imagine people building steam engines, but making transistors is beyond that capability of pretty much everyone I know. Perhaps a few million people would get by scavenging electronics left behind by the 5 billion dead, but they’re not going to be running semiconductor fabs and buying new cpu or ram chips. And they’re not going to be mining rare elements and smelting alloys like modern metallurgy.
I’m not sure what small and distantly distributed bands/villages of humans trying to find habitable places with productively farmable land would look like, but it doesn’t sound fun to me…
I’m old, and _maybe_ I could justify my existence in post climate apocalypse society by being “that guy” who gets other people to carefully remove the wiring harness and everything plugged into it from every abandoned car they come across, and re purposing engine management and entertainment system components into useful computing devices and electrical gadgets, or perhaps by building carburettors and magneto ignition systems to make efi vehicles run on home grown biofuel. But I’d say I’m
Rob ably way more likely be killed (and eaten?) as an old person with no useful contribution to the clan.
We can see what happens when a big civilization collapses by looking at the Amazonian tribes. Their ancestors were extremely sophisticated, but they forgot it all, except a few gems like making curare and ayahuasca, and detoxifying cassava.
I'm not really one of the people who believes in the extinction models (though no some people do), my thinking on that matter though is, lots of species will probably go extinct from this, if industrial level civilization cannot be maintained during climate change crisis then there is no specific reason why the human species would not be one of the species going extinct, we're smart, but without the delicate and hard to maintain infrastructure of technology it seems unlikely we would be able to leverage that intelligence to keep ourselves alive.
My personal fear though is more the model of large parts of earth's surface unlivable by humans, humanity down to a few million living near the poles.
Although both of the two you mention of course also strike me as potential catastrophic scenarios.
"doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800
ppm only decreases the pH of ocean water from about 8.2 to 7.9. This is well within the day-night fluctuations that already occur because of photosynthesis by plankton"
"doubling atmospheric CO2 from the current level of 400 ppm to 800
ppm only decreases the carbonate-ion concentration, [CO2−3], by about 30%. Ocean
surface waters are already supersaturated by several hundred per cent for formation
of CaCO3 crystals from Ca2+ and CO2−3. So scare stories about dissolving carbonate
shells are nonsense."
"Over most of the Phanerozoic, the past 550 million years, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been measured in thousands of parts per million, and life flourished in both the oceans and on land. This is hardly surprising, given the relative insensitivity of ocean pH to large changes in CO2 concentrations that we have discussed above, and given the fact that the pH changes that do occur are small compared to the natural variations of ocean pH in space and time"
"This minimalist discussion already shows how hard it is to scare informed people with ocean acidification, but, alas, many people are not informed."
If you or anyone else thinks this paper's calculations are wrong, then that would be interesting to learn why.
The "past 550 million years" includes the Permian-Triassic Extinction, or Great Dying, of 251 million years ago. Do they refer to the million-year death zone after this event as a period when "[CO2 was] measured in thousands of parts per million"? Seems like an incomplete analysis.
Wikipedia claims, "[the] trigger for these mass extinctions appears to be a warming of the ocean caused by a rise of carbon dioxide levels to about 1000 parts per million":
Could we not do both? Using the US as an example our space budget is peanuts compared to the defense budget. I know the defense contractors will get mad they cannot fleece taxpayers as much if we adjusted, but oh well.
Hey, don’t take civilian space contractors lightly. They can fleece taxpayers just as well or better than defense contractors. 2022 is the year of Linux on the SLS.
> trying to set up Mars colonies or similar escapades while not dealing with climate change
Would you be okay with the effort to go to Mars if the main person advocating for it were also simultaneously personally doing more than anyone else alive to reduce the human consumption of fossil fuels on Earth?
sure, however what I said contained the following:
>That is to say that I don't think he means we need to fix every problem
in short, my post was really describing what I think Robinson was getting at and I am not really wedded to the argument that we shouldn't do both at the same time, especially as the stuff we do to make one planet habitable might give spark to scientific/technological advancement that could help save the one we have.
> always going to be something threatening us even if it's mainly ourselves
It's always "ourselves". We as a race are our primary enemy and your desire not to see the problems we create for ourselves here and now makes you exactly the reason we will suffer. I used to fear human extinction, now I'm resigned to it.
> It's much easier to be an "escapist" by dabbling in distractions on earth than it is by building rockets or working on the science to make life possible on Mars!
Sorry, we won't get extinction. At least 0.1% will come through whatever happens, and, like the Amazonians after the pandemics, forget all we had and did.
If we face an anoxic ocean event, this simply isn't true. Such an event could leads to the upwelling and release of huge quantities of hydrogen sulfide. Diffused throughout the Earth's atmosphere this would kill nearly all life, and remain present in lethal concentrations for hundreds of thousands to millions of years judging by the fossil record from the Permian-Triassic extinction. That's a long time to rely on artificial life support systems.
the idea of going to mars is basic science, and basic science has yielded all sorts of useful discoveries for the human race.
but it is also hard to ignore the fact that it seems circular to turn the earth into something that looks like mars in the pursuit of turning mars into something that looks like earth.
so yes, doing basic science is good. but let's be clear that it's not a real plan and that the real problems at home are not only easier, but also far more pressing.
Except, going to Mars is not, in fact, science. Sending probe after probe is science, although it is getting pretty reflexive now, as very little remains to be learned from them.
yeah, maybe you're right. it does, however, seem to share something with basic science: it's an endeavor with no immediate or obvious value, yet expands the frontiers of knowledge and know-how for the species as a whole.
Nevermind that even if we turned Earth into a glorious green utopia, eventually a big enough rock is going to come along and boop us and kill everyone and everything.
It is unlikely any of the planets in the solar system could sustain humanity or life if the Earth is lost in the next few centuries. Thousands, at most, would live on the planet. We've always had an ecosystem to rely on, and even a severely damaged one would be more survivable than the cold wastes of Mars.
Well then we’d better hurry and get started building colonies now, as the destruction of humanity on Earth might be in a year or a kiloyear or a megayear—we simply don’t know.
Don’t wait for the drive to start clicking to make backups.
You are welcome to build a refuge at the South Pole. It will be an overwhelmingly more livable environment than can be constructed on other bodies. Or out in the middle of the Kalahari Desert, or in the center of Australia, likewise.
Southern hemisphere is recommended, anyway, as probably few nukes will target there; maybe none!
We do not. We have an outpost. Literally no one actually resides there; everyone there is a temporary visitor, with a home elsewhere. It is 100% dependent on imports of every single thing excepting only air and water.
The need to actually have that offsite backup being online makes them rather unlikely. Like setting up your offsite in middle of desert and trying to make parts there yourself. Fun times...
Presently it does not appear that the current cataclysms predicted for Earth in the short term (500 years) will result in destruction of the biosphere or even human extinction.
Early humans and their ancestors have experienced two major population bottlenecks in the past. We may well see a third relatively shortly, but that is very different from extinction.
> On its face, this might seem contradictory to say after writing a hopeful trilogy about the colonization of Mars, but it’s consistent if you look closer.
Or if you realize that things authors write aren't necessarily what they think should happen in real life.
KSR's books are such great tales of humanity. Again and again and again they resist great man theories of history & immerse us in such long views of how slow the tide of opinion is, how glacially humanity as a whole moves. The science fiction of KSR's books is more a backdrop, if often feels to me, to exploring social dynamics at varying scales. Rightly calling out non-terran colonization as futile without earth seems like a basic sensible lock I'd expect from this master of the genre, because while most of their books are going deep on intersocial dynamics, KSR hammers in a bunch of great sci-fi mini lessons, & this one seems fairly obvious.
It is the journey that engineering and our psychology as a species goes through in order to take us to Mars that is the important part, just like how it was for the Moon. We advance in our ability to understand and control materials and learn what is truly necessary to sustain life, while our astronauts experience a world without borders and return with their tales.
It is very short sighted to believe that we have to frame every problem as a terrestrial problem with limited scope we have to solve, and that narrow-mindedness is something that will make it more difficult to find general solutions that are applicable beyond the bounds of earth or may even involve utilization of beyond earth resources such as space, asteroids, low gravity, satellites, or something novel.
This argument is tiresome. Earth is not just a rock, it includes all the species and environment, which is doomed. If it's only just a rock, there are billions such, name any of those earth and problem solved. Whatever happens after that, when or if things will be like now flourishing, nobody surely knows. So lets stop guessing that part. Everything that is here right now except the rock is dying.
On the contrary humans will survive even if there are full blown nuclear attacks, we will go underground.
The aim of humanity is to continue as a species. Whether the Earth as a chunk of rock orbiting the sun will carry without us doesn't matter; when we talk about "life" we mean humans.
A small number of people realised that they can get vastly rich individually by telling large numbers of people they should passively consume media instead of actually living...
I've heard of massive dust storms on Mars. This is the first I've heard of deadly dust. It's also bombarded by X-rays and gamma rays. So Mars is completely uninhabitable. Astronauts would need an airlock with chemical shower and secondary breathing apparatus to be able to even consider taking off their space suit. The base would have to be underground. To be clear the plan is to fly past the moon and through space for nine months for that? Sounds half baked.
I don't understand why "the base would have to be underground" is such a deal-breaker for so many people. I mean it would suck if your whole environment is like a typical basement, but these could be quite large living spaces, well lit with plants and trees and big empty spaces. Lava tubes on Earth that are spacious and miles long aren't all that rare, and on Mars I think the expectation is that lower gravity should tend to result in larger lava tubes.
The perchlorates are a problem, but not one that's impossible to deal with. One possible workaround is to have space suits that you never actually bring inside, you just sort of climb in and out through a hatch in the back that docks with the habitat. Similarly with vehicles, they could dock with the habitat so you can get in and out without going outside.
Mars is made of solid volcanic rock covered in dust. If the hypothetical lava tube idea doesn't work, not much else will. My skepticism begins with SpaceX releasing illustrations of a planned above-ground base.[1] Elon has said for the base to become self sustainable they will need around a million people. There is a fine line between genius and insanity.
I agree that an above-ground base is probably not realistic without substantial shielding. The illustration I'm inclined to interpret as marketing fluff.
I don't think lava tubes are the only option, though -- they're just probably the best option in terms of most space for the least effort. Mars has a lot of sulfur which can be used to make a kind of sulfur-based concrete that isn't used much on Earth because Portland cement is much more useful and convenient. But let's say you can make building blocks out of sulfur-based concrete or some other native material. (Worst case you make them out of something light and bring them with you from Earth.) You dig a big hole in the dusty soil, then stack blocks igloo-fashion to make a dome in the bottom of the hole. Then you stack some more blocks to make a (relatively) dust-free stairwell, then pile the Martian soid set aside from digging the hole back over the top of everything else. So now you have a strong below-ground compressive structure that you can line with plastic or something and put in an airlock. The weight of the soil above counteracts the air pressure inside.
Ideally most of the habitat-construction work would be done by robots before people get there; that would be some tricky engineering though.
On Earth there are numerous second and third order effects to consider. For example, Sahara is considered a very important source of phosphorus for the Amazon rainforest [0] and making Sahara green could have a huge negative impact on it. Meanwhile on Mars impact of terraforming mistakes on population is much smaller because it would be already shielded heavily from external environment.
The presence of water makes an otherwise inhospitable place attractive. The same is likely to be true on Mars - colonies will be sited near ice for the same reason.
Do I intend to live forever? No. I think humans should make plans that benefit future generations, not just our own.
That's not necessarily true, though. There are things you can do with a fresh slate, empty planet that aren't feasible on Earth. It also misses the redundancy aspect of colonizing another planet.
Short-term Mars plans aren't "terraform it so you can live outside"; it's stuff we can already likely accomplish in the Sahara or Antarctica if we really felt like it. Oases already exist in the Sahara; humans have permanent inhabitation in the Antarctic.
Another comment mentioned turning the Sahara green. This is] within our capacity. But the Sahara, as presently composited, is home to myriad life. It is a cultural edifice for bordering civilizations. And its modification would have repercussions for every other person on the planet.
This baggage doesn't exist on Mars. (To the degree it does, it's de minimus compared with Earth's.) We can close off a canyon, pressurize it and call it a city. Try doing a tenth of that here without going bankrupt on the back of CEQUA challenges.
> it is easier to heat up a planet, then we can both terraform Mars and not fix Earth
That's not the only challenge with terraforming Mars, e.g. you also have to remove perchlorates and install a healthy soil microbiome etc. Those are fertile ground (pun not intended) for earthly applications.
I'd say the challenge on earth is political. I'm not sure if changing the minds and actions of billions of humans is easier than removing all the perchlorates from Mars.
I'd expect to see people living in Antarctica before large numbers of people move to the Moon/Mars. Living conditions are a lot easier if you don't have to worry about pressure or oxygen.
"Don't do the hard thing, easier things exist" is always true. Why not do the harder thing? Marathon runners don't typically go "man, it'd be better if I just did a 5K", right?
Sure, but that doesn't mean you have to complete a 5K race before you're allowed to do a marathon. A marathon can be your first competitive race.
We can similarly go to Mars before we grow crops in Antarctica, even if the resulting tech would also have the side benefit of being useful there. They needn't even be mutually exclusive; some prospective techs for a Mars or Moon base already get tested in places like Antarctica.
Nature does that every 5000 or 20000 years, iirc or maybe they haven't fully determined the cycle times yet. But there is evidence that it has been grassland and grazed upon
The idea is nice to 'safe' humanity by creating a colony on mars. But the problem I see in that is we would be creating fractions of marsians and earthlings. That I only see in ending up in more conflict between the two. If we can't live in harmony on earth how can a colony on mars be even possible?
United earth has a better chance than colonies elsewhere.
Debatable. And the point is that the benefit of solving/ameliorating the climate problem on Earth is far far far greater than the benefit of a Mars colony. We just have to put ourselves on some sustainable footing and survive until the 22nd century, before we start trying to solve problems like “ensuring humanity’s survival post Earth-shattering asteroid strike”, which is all that a serious Mars colony would solve.
Kind of a tangent, but for any German speakers (or someone learning German), there is a fun series about kids on a Mars Colony from Andreas Eschbach called Das Marsprojekt, it has 6 books in the series. It was really fun to read, and if you’re intermediate a good way to learn.
I didnt realize this place was so infested with people that have swallowed the environmental catastrophe koolaid. Even if we accept the models as correct (they likely are not, but lets ignore that) the timelines to destruction are measured in centuries in all but the most insane models and pretty much all the models fail to take into account the likely topping out of population growth and beginning of.population shrinking that will almost certainly happen later this century. The faster we get to Mars (or oneill cylinders or some other viable off planet backup) the faster we can get them to self sustaining. So in the face of uncertainty it is insane to have the opinion that we shouldn't be working on offside backup because we very well could have it self sustaining before a catastrophe actually happens because we don't really know when the catastrophe will occur and our predictions are likely dramatically incorrectly biased to pessimism
Opposite, most people in world are still drinking the overpopulation koolaid given by the privileged and corporations. Who wants more people only to buy their products and keep the quarterly growth moving up and for cheap labour exploit.
There's enough koolaid for everybody apparently. It's going to be weird if any of these guys live to 2100 while avoiding senility and see the actual concern of the day is not enough co2 in the atmosphere because the tectonic shift in attitudes towards nuclear caused by the Ukraine invasion gets the regulators of that industry to be more reasonable, causing a flourishing of that industry and the accompanying massive drop in fossil fuel usage without the drop in living standard the crazy stuff being proposed today will cause.
or everything in steve Koonin's book unsettled. There are real problems at the basic science level with the models and to say they are overly optimistic is just another sign of excessive koolaid consumption.
What's the compelling benefit of the bottom of the ocean that Mars lacks? A crack in your Mars dome is fixable; a crack at the bottom of the ocean means instant death beyond a couple hundred feet down.
We have an easier time keeping folks alive on the ISS than on the ocean floor. The pressure differential between vacuum and human-friendly conditions is one atmosphere. In the water, every ten meters down is another atmosphere of pressure. Leaks on a submarine become quickly catastrophic; small leaks in space can be fixed over months. (https://www.space.com/cosmonauts-seal-space-station-air-leak...)
Yet, anything in the water is no more than a few hours away, and any mass of equipment or supplies can be moved there in that time, anytime you like.
Mars is always at best 9 months away. (Not 6 as Elon likes to lie.) Usually it would take much longer. And, how much stuff you can move at once is drastically limited.
There is no need to go below just a few atmospheres worth of pressure, in any case. Little that happens at the surface penetrates very deep.
Absolutely nobody is going to want to make a life on Mars. Being exciting is all it has going for it. Bottom of the sea would be a much more viable place if we needed to escape from some kind of extreme weather. It must be so unfathomably cheaper than Mars.
op means terraform in a sustainable way.
i argue that we are good at making things liveable but not sustainable. i would not be surprised if the exploitation of resources will continue galactically and we should do so to carry the light of consciousness :-)
Mars colonization isn't happening. SpaceX's Starship might be flying within the next year, yet there has been no substantial development of Martian habitat technology. Are they building a bridge to nowhere? I think it's obvious that Starship was never about Mars; from the start it has been intended for launching extremely large satellite constellations (particularly for Starlink and DoD contracts.) SpaceX's talk of Mars is little more than a recruiting scheme.
As far as I can tell the strongest evidence against my take is the $100M prize money Elon Musk has offered up for carbon capture that would supposedly be for making methane fuel on Mars. Making fuel that way would be pointless on Earth (except for greenwashing/PR.) But that's not even $100M spent, just $100M pledged.
I've wondered about the same thing; if it suddenly became cheap to send stuff to Mars, where's all the infrastructure we'd supposedly be sending? Is it being developed right now, or has it been a distant goal for so long that nobody yet has the attitude that it's time to start packing our things?
I think, though, that if it's actually happening it might not be happening in a very public way. I mean, it's not exactly in the news every time someone develops a new space suit or a new air lock or a more efficient CO2 removal system. And a lot of the equipment sent to mars will probably just be boring industrial equipment, tools, construction materials, storage tanks, electrical cable, pipes, and so on, some of the same or only slightly modified from what's available at any hardware store. A few things will be highly specialized for the Martian environment, such as vehicles. Some things will be redesigned for no other reason than to reduce the mass so we can send more stuff cheaper.
I wonder if there are any large-scale coordinated projects to figure out what exactly is needed for a minimum viable settlement, or if it's all kind of ad-hoc with a bunch of private companies and universities working on projects more-or-less at random with no organization? Or if everyone is kind of just sitting on their thumbs waiting for someone to take charge and/or start giving out grants and making purchases?
> Mars colonization isn't happening. SpaceX's Starship might be flying within the next year, yet there has been no substantial development of Martian habitat technology.
"Isn't happening" was similarly a slam against the Falcon 9's reusability prospects not long ago. It should hardly be shocking that no one's making Mars habitats until the details of getting them there are known; it's entirely possible Starship will receive significant redesigns during development, just as F9 did.
> Are they building a bridge to nowhere?
Yes, just as ship captains in the 1500s largely didn't build their own colonies in the Americas. The Mayflower made other trips back and forth, providing transport to settlers who were responsible for deciding what to bring and how to use it.
> "Isn't happening" was similarly a slam against the Falcon 9's reusability prospects not long ago.
Not so. SpaceX was visibly investing in reusable boosters more than 10 years ago. Everything SpaceX has actually spent serious money on is something that has a mundane commercial application, reusable boosters particularly. There has been no comparable investment in Martian habitats.
The "if you build it they will come" argument doesn't make sense. If serious Martian habitat development only starts after Starship is flying, it will take decades to be ready. The Europeans who sailed to America packed their ships with a bunch of commercially available supplies and hoped for the best. There is no commercially available Martian habitat, countless billions of dollars and many years of development will be necessary. That's presently not happening. Even if it starts tomorrow, that development would be laughably far behind Starship development.
They're not building a rocket for customers they think maybe might exist in 20 or 30 years.
> There has been no comparable investment in Martian habitats.
Nor were they investing in lunar landers or mission equipment, until NASA bought a ride on Starship for Artemis. If SpaceX can get Starship to Mars, the idea that NASA wouldn't bother to buy some flights for some Mars landings seems nonsensical.
> If serious Martian habitat development only starts after Starship is flying, it will take decades to be ready.
So? Mars colonization is a centuries/milennia sort of thing.
> And their competitors laughed at the idea. ULA doubted SpaceX's resuability prospects as recently as 2020
Well take that matter up with them. I wasn't among those laughing at their plan to develop reusable boosters. Reusable boosters have clear commercial application. Everything SpaceX has actually put serious money behind is something that has near-term commercial value.
> Nor were they investing in lunar landers or mission equipment, until NASA bought a ride on Starship for Artemis.
SpaceX won a contract. How much have they actually spent in developing lunar-specific equipment? I doubt they even expected to win that contract.
> So? Mars colonization is a centuries/milennia sort of thing.
A serious Mars colonization effort a century from now obviously won't be using Starship, unless rocket development severely stagnates between now and then. So if you're conceding that sort of timeline, let me reiterate my point: Starship will never bring a colony to Mars. There is presently no serious effort underway to colonize Mars.
They are investing heavily in Starship. A spacecraft capable of getting to Mars.
> won't be using Starship
I wouldn't be so sure. Practically every non-SpaceX workhorse spacecraft in use today has roots in rockets developed in 1960s. That's 60+ years ago. Some are even earlier: Delta is the latest version of Thor from 1950s. Soyuz rockets were designed in 1960s. RD-180x series were built for Buran and is based on the NK-33 from 1960s.
It's not so difficult to imagine that 60 years from now, in the year 2082 we might be able to get people to Mars, perhaps using Starship.
> Starship will never bring a colony to Mars
Obviously. It will start with a small crew. Probably after we mastered getting to the moon.
Maybe what's needed isn't actually all that sophisticated, and is mostly old technology that's been used for decades?
I mean, a Mars habitat could be something as simple as: find a lava tube, unroll a giant plastic bag, inflate it with air so it's snug up against the walls, and put an airlock at one end? It'd be underground, away from radiation. It could be insulated to keep heat in.
The environment could be maintained by similar equipment to what's on ISS, but some of the problems would actually be easier on Mars because there's an available atmosphere and a landscape that can provide resources. No need to bring extra oxygen, and maybe not even extra water.
Obviously there's a lot of little details you'd need to work out, but Mars is a less hostile environment than ones we've already sent people to, like the moon or even low Earth orbit.
I don't think this is "20 or 30 years out". I think it could happen pretty quickly, assuming Starship meets expectations.
I think there is an economic problem, though: the first Starships to Mars are going to be stuck there for a long time because they won't have fuel for the return trip. Reusable ships are great, but if it's 10-20 years before any of them come back that kind of hurts the argument that reusability will make going to Mars cheap and convenient.
Starship is pathetically inadequate to colonize Mars with, even if it were a good idea to try. There will be no colony on Mars. It is just possible a can could be placed there for a few people to squat in for a few months at a time. But there would be no reason to put them there. Mars is a dump, with nothing of interest to offer.
Starship is probably adequate to support a smallish Moon base, along McMurdo lines. The moon offers much of interest, particularly its billion-year-old lava tubes.
Because you could use them to build an industrial base with workers returning regularly like on an oil platform. You can also use the moon base to build spaceships without regards for aerodynamics. Or send material relatively cheap into orbit for assembly there.
Any on Mars have been subject to weather, so are ordinary caves.
Lunar lava tubes are wholly unique. They will probably be filled with incredible filigreed crystal structures grown by differential vacuum sublimation over uninterrupted hundreds of millions of years.
It's exciting to imagine various public and private ventures all booking rides on Starship to Mars, or more realistically in the short term, to the Moon.
To my eyes, those don't look like qualifying the word "substantial development". If you want to seriously take Mars colonization as a survival strategy for human species, you need a way to either implant most of the modern infrastructure in a massive scale (at least for hundreds of millions, otherwise the society won't sustain by itself) or develop a novel technology to terraform the planet into a human livable form within a reasonable budget. At that moment, we can talk about Martian habitat.
> If you want to seriously take Mars colonization as a survival strategy for human species, you need a way to either implant most of the modern infrastructure in a massive scale (at least for hundreds of millions, otherwise the society won't sustain by itself) or develop a novel technology to terraform the planet into a human livable form within a reasonable budget. At that moment, we can talk about Martian habitat.
We cannot sustain a million people on Mars just yet. That's a far cry from claiming there has been no progress. For that claim to sustain, the British Bombe was a dud for not being able to run one's taxes.
THAT SAID: the monarchist Thiel acolytes pushing Mars to profit off surveillance contracts while trashing anything resembling a response to our climate crisis can go stuff it. They are not only destroying what we have. They are, in the long run, undermining the Mars project as well.
At the pace those developments are progressing, maybe you'll have a viable Mars colony in one or two centuries. A serious effort to develop Mars colony habitats to be used with Starship would look like the Manhattan Project. What you have there are glorified highschool science-fair projects.
The problem with this attitude is that there is no evidence that we will ever completely solve our problems on earth. There is always going to be something threatening us even if it's mainly ourselves. Also, it's the same philosophy critics of the space race espoused yet many of the tools we use to identify and track our global problems are an unintended outgrowth of that great power contest, e.g. climate sensing satellites. It's a deeply inspiring effort to colonize another planet and far from an "escapist" activity it's something which gives many people hope for the future. It's much easier to be an "escapist" by dabbling in distractions on earth than it is by building rockets or working on the science to make life possible on Mars! Sure, the endeavor shouldn't be a major global economic line item in the meantime but I'm not aware of the necessity to go that far.