Currently reading Blue Mars, the third and final book in the trilogy. It's amazingly fascinating but also exhausting. I say with full seriousness it may be best to read this with a very specific high resolution full color map of Mars on your wall somewhere.<p>If anything KSR is not giving himself as much credit as he deserves, as personal AIs show up in ways that are remarkably salient and similar to what we're currently seeing. And he talks about advances in genetics that parallel what we're figuring out with CRISPR at least to some degrees. The biggest "error" is the preoccupation with a Paul Ehrlich-style population boom, but by the same token it reveals that the book is a window into the time it was made.<p>If any ambitious and aspiring science novelists are reading this, I would love for someone to be the Kim Stanley Robinson of Venus and tell the story of colonization there, aspiring to the same bar of technical specificity that KSR had for Red Mars.
Good on you, exhausting is the right word I’d think. Red Mars was the book that killed my enthusiasm for reading for nearly a year. Something about it bored me to tears and yet, I kept reading (my fault) I think I gave up at 60%.<p>I feel like I should like it, I’ve read everything my Neal Stephenson so I’m not averse to hefty books
I think I was in a similar boat and where in doubt, I think I powered through for completionist sake. But it's possible you paused right before some of the most interesting stuff in the whole book.<p>It's not a spoiler to note that the it begins with a flash forward that talks about the fate of a major character. Some of the most interesting stuff starts happening to them and it comes full circle in a way that leads up to that flash forward. And mercifully the constant mentions of regolith lessen the deeper into the series you get.
I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best (paraphrasing): It takes less money and effort to fix Earth than to terraform Mars.
However there are a lot of entrenched interests that would be harmed by any large-scale attempts at fixing earth. Even if you paid for it out of your own pocket and brought your own engineers, your attempt at fixing Earth would face strong opposition. Meanwhile barely anyone would oppose your attempt at improving Mars.<p>The article is however spot on that terraforming Mars looked easier 30 years ago than it looks now, with all the new knowledge we have from Mars rovers. Now any "realistic" plan would be millions of people living in pressurized habitats and venturing out in suits, not billions walking on the surface in t-shirts. Closer to what we see in The Expanse than to what we dreamed up in the 80s and 90s
Classic Neil, always something smart-sounding to say about the wrong thing. It's more about discovery and adventure than fleeing a dying planet. To quote someone that I'm sure is Neil's intellectual superior, "¿Por qué no los dos?"
Because at this rate we'll be lucky to get enough funding and cooperation just to prevent Earth from warming by 4+C, and we need all hands on deck for that.
I know deGrasse is apparently in private, a bit of a ahole, but in this case he is completely correct: <a href="https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY</a>
Classic sarcastic ironically detached drive-by HN comment. Where is the money going to come from to do both? Every dollar spent on discovery and adventure could be invested in Earth based projects.
> "¿Por qué no los dos?"<p>Because right now we're not investing in fixing Earth but seriously investing in an infeasible Mars mission.
Because colonizing Mars is only slightly more realistic than breeding unicorns.
I don't remember the source but I also like this quote: Before we worry about terraforming Mars, maybe first we should stop Venusforming Terra.
The only advantage of terraforming Mars is that if you do it wrong you're not making it worse for anybody that lives there. It could be a good test bench if it wasn't for the elephant in the room: it takes a very long time to terraform a planet
Of course that is true, every Mars enthusiast will agree. Not a single person is saying to leave Earth behind to rot. Agree with Mars proponents or not, but at least don't argue against strawmen. Their actual argument treats Mars as a backup strategy for humanity and a science outpost
Terraform Earth!
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Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic event, that will force the US government to spend more than 70% to 80% of tax revenues on servicing said debt.<p>There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is nothing astronauts could do that a sophisticated robot team would not do better.<p>Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...
Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days. Our latest and greatest model (Perseverance) has traveled 40km (25mi) in 5 years, with the support of a scout helicopter. Which is more than what Curiosity managed in 13 years. But that's approximately what they did in Apollo 17 in five hours. Granted, Apollo 17 didn't make quite as many stops to analyze rocks, but it should give you an idea of the speed difference between our Mars robots and humans. Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
Those robots were designed 20 years ago... You can send now a whole swarm of humanoid robots, that would recharge 24x7 out of a KRUSTY Reactor [1], you did not even had LLMs then.<p>[1] - <a href="https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03-KRUSTY%20Reactor%20Design.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...</a>
No, we really can't send something like that now. Or at least not if we want it to be useful on arrival.<p>I'll make an educated guess that, as of this moment, there are zero functioning swarms of humanoid robots recharging on such a reactor on Earth.<p>Once we add radiation shielding, software and hardware reliability, landing (marsing?) it all safely and deploying it (among others) I wouldn't be surprised if the earliest arrival time is, unsurprisingly, 20 years in the future.
>> Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days.<p>What? The unmanned space program has been beyond the edges of our solar system. Meanwhile humans have been day tourists in space. I don't know how you can come to this conclusion that "humans > robots" when humans have never even been close to the surface of Mars.<p>>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet<p>How many robots could we land with the equivalent resources, or telescope satellites, or autonomous probes?
Better to divert money to space exploration than to use it for war on the only planet we currently have.
but this <i>is</i> the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.
Would that toe-hold actually <i>survive</i> without constant resupply vessels?<p>There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right?<p>How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years?<p>We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually <i>do</i>, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.
<i>There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars</i><p>Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge.<p>If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.
We are not in a meeting at SpaceX trying to please Elon. I dont think you realize what you are up against...Do you know what radiation does to humans?<p>For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...<p>FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:<p>Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)<p>In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day<p>for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day<p>Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...<p>And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.<p>Send lots of robots...
Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle.<p>One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a <i>space station</i> are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.
I'd love to see you make more of an effort to try and understand the idea you're engaging in than just engaging in an emotionally charged dismissal. I try to profess the principle of charity here from time to time, which means tackling the version of an idea that credits it with making the most sense.<p>So if the version of the idea that you're engaging with is one that doomed to fail, doesn't have the resources or technology or population to succeed... maybe assume that's not the version I'm talking about?<p>There are contexts where I love to get into these kinds of details (there was an amazing conversation on HN from a few months ago [1] about what would be involved in sending a bunch of voyager-style space probes to alpha centauri), but you have to want to try.<p>1. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058528">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058528</a>
If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.<p>Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.
>> Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so.<p>Ok layout here your scientific or economic case...please.
Because so far, the only trickle economic effects, where geriatric billionaires creating sub 100 km space rides to impress their Silicone Sally girlfriends...
It's always going to be easier to live underground or under the sea, and you don't see anyone doing that.
Or Antarctica too.<p>Like, pretty much any of those place has<p>0) Air at not a near vacuum<p>1) Liquid water<p>2) not a lot of radiation<p>3) appropriate gravity<p>Why would you want to even live on Mars? You have to essentially live in a very small pressure bunker at some rad-safe depth. Doing so for a little while would be fun and exciting, sure. Homesteading that life? Every one of your kids would opt to leave (if possible) the second they got a chance.
"To get to our habitat, you take a commercial flight to Bali, then a two-hour trip by boat" just does not have the same ring as "it's a six month trip in a space ship, but in a couple decades it might be as fast as 30 days". Being far away from everything is a major part of the appeal<p>If it's possible to call me back to the SF office for a client meeting the day after tomorrow I'm not going
Well, I seem to recall hearing about this city called "Rapture" under the sea, and it didn't work out very well at all. Would you kindly read up on it?
"Also, we’ve learned more about the bad effects of lighter-than-Earthly gravity on human bodies,"<p>How can he confidently use that argument when we don't have any data between 0g and 1g, other than 12 Apollo astronauts, that spend less than 3 days on the moon?<p>It might very well be that the 0.38g on Mars are sufficient to make many problems go away. The two simple facts of your blood being pulled downward and moving your body around taking effort could already fix a lot of the medical issues astronauts face in 0g.
That is sadly the original title but the article is much better than the title. Authors don't get to write their own headlines.
Between the realism about terraforming Mars and the strong likelihood that faster-than-light travel may never happen, is anyone else feeling a bit melancholic? It feels like a possible future has been taken away from us.
A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.<p>The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.<p>They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].<p>From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.<p>The only solution is to build a <i>really</i> big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.<p>The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?<p>Something something new lands something exploration something.<p>Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just <i>not</i> happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.<p>It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.<p>[0] He made a great point that you should <i>not</i> assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.<p>[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.<p>[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.
Unlike FTL, cryosleep and generation ships aren't known to violate any laws of physics. We can still explore the galaxy as soon as we solve the equally difficult engineering problems there.
If we solve fusion to the point where it is easy in a relatively light reactor or manage to "safely" contain significant amounts of antimatter, it is possible to travel the stars by maintaining 1g acceleration for years or decades. But of course maintaining 1g acceleration for even just an hour, not to mention years, while theoretically possible, is still so far outside of practicality that I don't expect to see any practical plans for it in my life time.<p>The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.<p>So the possibility still exists, current physics is a big obstacle to challenge, but is not a solid barrier preventing our expansion in the far future.
I also feel that a good solution of the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar travel is either impossible or too unpractical at scale and that humanity may be trapped in this system forever.
I think there are a lot of good futures that involve things being better on Earth
An improbable future was sold to you as probable. Why attack the people calling BS for taking away a BS fantasy? If you actually admire science and not science fiction, you should be glad when you are confronted with overwhelming reasons why your priors are wrong.<p>Why is improving life on earth for the billions here in poverty not a worthwhile fantasy? Why does that noble goal not sustain you in the way space operas do?
IDK, that feels like being melancholic about not having unicrons and fairies in the world. It wasn't something that someone took from you. It was never going to happen.<p>But, I think in relation to what you're talking about, I'm more "melancholic" about the concept that something like Star Fleet will never exist. Not that I want to fly around between planets in garishly colored uniforms, but the broader vision of the pursuit of truth, self-betterment, and diplomacy. Not having space travel be a regular thing doesn't <i>have</i> to prevent that, but it does kind of underscore that our society is unlikely to ever develop that :(
To me the future was taken away from us in 1997. That's when my teenage life turned from fun to depressing. Web 2.0 turned stinking because of Facebook and everything cool turned unified. Apple and Google are both wet teabags that ultimately own the walled gardens we can't escape.<p>Want to go somewhere else? Take the Cloudflare tunnel. Whatever the Y2K bug was suppose to be never happened and we've been stuck in the general era of 2003.<p>We should of had "LLMs" back in 2006-2008 but we chose war instead.<p>We now have all this digital technology but none of the hardware to build it with.
First off, and I'm very sorry to do this, "should of" is never, ever right.<p>Second we couldn't have LLMs in 2006. In fact I'm not sure we could've had them without the massive amount of user-generated content that came from Web 2.0, including Facebook. Reddit, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow are big sources of training data.
You just grew up. Every generation seems to take everything up to maturity as natural and good, then everything after is the decline of civilization.
Mars is only a few billion dollars of investment away from being quite habitable, and Mr. Musk should make plans to retire there along with his friends and senior execs within the year.
Perhaps we can organise a kickstarter?
Imagine what you would say if they actually did so: invest (more than) a few billions in making part of Mars habitable by, say, building one of those 50's SF domes or something outlandish like that. Move there with their billions locked up in the new colony. Make it work, prove it actually was feasible. Manage to stay alive long enough to make the colony largely self-sustaining. Never mind the how, never mind the likeliness of it happening, just be John Lennon for a second and Imagine.<p><i>Those fat cats took their billions to create their own colony on planet X while we're left here on a dying Earth</i><p><i>Why should those greedy capitalists get their own planet? They should open it up to refugees from Earth!</i><p><i>Mars wasn't built by Musk & Co., it was built by $(insert_favourite_group) and belongs to them</i><p>Etcetera. Same old story, same old song. Quite a tiring one at that. I'd say let them have a go at creating a Mars colony and if they succeed - which is rather unlikely - they get to decide what to do with their settlement.
There is currently and never has yet been a fully self-sufficient and stable artificial human habitat. Until that exists nobody is going to be living on Mars and anyone who says otherwise is talking out of their ass.
It's a shame Biosphere 2 didn't get more funding. It was supposed to solve exactly this issue, with the tremendous cost advantage of being reachable by car instead of rockets<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2</a>
When this topic comes up I always think of this movie:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown</a>
<a href="https://archive.ph/Hp69I" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/Hp69I</a>
Humans must expand through the solar system and beyond. Mars is an okay goal, but the moon is a better bet for living quarters for now.<p>Earth is a jewel, but we have to expand and explore. It's our destiny.<p>Ultimately you need to live underground on the Mars to avoid radiation.
I mean he had to invent a decent amount of magic technology (the radiation proof tent material for just one example) and purposely not do the math on other parts to make his story work.<p>IMHO the biggest tell that Elon has never been serious about Mars is that he has been completely focused on the rocket and has severely neglected the actual hard part of the problem: The self sustained habitat for the people to live in. There should be experimental habitats dotting the SpaceX campus with engineers and researchers working hand in hand to solve the problem of scaling up a terrarium to people size. It is not easy. Previous attempts have ended in expensive failures. And those efforts didn't have to be launched on a rocket and landed on a low gravity planet with a very thin atmosphere. Until Elon starts to tackle this problem I know that all of the talk of Mars habitats is just blowing smoke up the asses of investors.
I'm as big of an Elon-hater as you'll find, but I kind of have to disagree. Working on the habitat before the rocket is cart before horse. The rocket is a prerequisite to even an experimental trip to Mars.<p>If we ever do actually colonize Mars, the progression would look something like:
1. Experimental missions
2. Small but permanent settlement made out of Starships cobbled together
3. New construction with increasing proportion of in-situ resources until fully independent
Small recommendation here which I saw recently is Werner Herzog's 2016 film <i>Lo and Behold</i>, which features Musk and all his mars stuff quite a lot! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the...</a>
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.<p>Which is a fair point, but the other points (about soil toxicity, cosmic rays and lower gravity) are all things that can be mitigated. Yes, it would be extravagantly expensive in per-human terms to house people on Mars. But the main reason for doing so -- that should something cataclysmic happen to the Earth it would behoove us to have a credible backup plan -- stands.
The list of potential cataclysms on Earth for which being on Mars would be preferable to <i>still being on Earth despite the cataclysm</i> is pretty short. Mostly amounts to whole-crust-liquifying (way, way worse than the K-T event) asteroids. For just about everything else, earthbound bunkers would be better.<p>Mars is <i>so bad</i> that you have to turn all of the Earth's surface to lava before it's worse than Mars, basically.
> that should something cataclysmic happen to the Earth it would behoove us to have a credible backup plan -- stands.<p>The day after the asteroid hit Earth would still be better than the best day on Mars.
We have never, even as a proof of concept, been able to develop a closed system capable of supporting mammalian life separate from earth's ecosystems. We assume it's possible based on no particularly rigorous evidence and in spite of our numerous failures to even come close. "Mars as backup" is not a credible plan based on science within even our optimistic grasp.<p>The technology & social systems capable of doing this would be incredibly valuable long before any permanent mars settlement became feasible so if we can do it we should and then we can see.
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.<p>No, it is not a relevant point, at all. There are close to 9 billion people on Earth, more than enough for some of them to focus on expanding human life out into the solar system no matter how small the chance of success. Others can work on the problems 'we created here'. If our predecessors thought like that we'd never have explored the oceans, found new continents, developed industry, took to the skies, made the first tentative jumps into space. Let those who have the means and capabilities to do so explore and 'conquer' those 'new frontiers'. If you insist on solving problems here on earth I'd say get crackin'. If you succeed we'll raise a statue for you and place it next to the ones we made for those who conquered Mars or built that giant wheel in the sky or whatever.
I thought this Red Mars was selected for a movie or series a couple of years ago. I guess not, but I think it would make for a good mini-series.<p>But I agree with the author, and I am starting to wonder if the same thing could be applied if we find earth like planets around other stars.<p>I almost think on those planets there could be something in the air or water or dirt that could harm or even kill us if we fond a way there.
If the planet is sterile it will need to be terraformed, if it isnt it will likely kill us. Just moving people round this planet caused deaths by the introduction of diseases to new communities.<p>so we then need to sterilise the planet before terraforming it. There just doesnt seem to be a need for expansion to other planets. Short of our star going supernova everything else is cheaper to fix here.
We might not be the only viable biochemistry in the universe.
True enough, but it's still incumbent on us to understand what other biochemistries are plausible based on what we know. We look for things like organic molecules and planets in habitable zones because we know a lot about the mechanisms that allow them to support life.<p>And we <i>are</i> curious about alternative biochemistries, I think that drives a huge amount of curiosity toward Jupiter's Galilean moons especially Europa. My worry is that people say "well there might be other biochemistries" as a deepity that kind of checks out from looking at any specifics, unfocusing conversations that were actually more focused prior to the emergence of the deepity.
I was thinking along the lines on those other planets, life evolved to need what ever exists there that can kill us. And vis-a-versa
There's way too much depth in this (wonderful, cautiously hopeful) series to pack into a movie, or even a trilogy.
I really hope they don't make it a movie or TV show, if only because I know deep down they will neuter out all the communism and Islam from it and make it somehow about a group of hot 20 somethings dealing with romance. cf. Netflix's <i>Three Body Problem</i> here.
The point of going to other planets was never really to live there, it is to strip mine them of resources.
How about we just commit to fucking up one planet at a time? Arguably humanity is a dangerous invasive species that destroys any environment it inhabits.<p>Until we do better we should treat other planets more like a park than fresh real estate.
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