Erm…
Terry Gross did a pretty interesting conversation with Mark O’Connell about his book on apocalypse preppers, but there was this one area where…how shall I say, everyone was missing something. I can’t find a transcript but there’s a summary.
On how some doomsday preppers see Mars as a backup planet
Mars is almost like the next step up from New Zealand. If New Zealand is kind of the safest retreat on this planet, then, if — everything goes wrong here and the planet gets hit by an asteroid or whatever — the term that is used amongst Mars enthusiasts would be we need a “backup planet.”
That already gets my back up, because Mars can’t be a “backup planet” (and neither can any other planet). To take all the stuff humans would need to survive would take an impossible amount of fuel; just to take some humans would take an impossible amount of fuel, and why would that be available after a civilization-ending catastrophe? Colonizing Mars is not feasible, it’s a fantasy. But that’s not even the thing; it gets worse. O’Connell expands on the idea (about 20 minutes in) (my quick transcription, with some “kind of”s omitted):
You know, things like climate change, an asteroid strike, anything that could sort of present an existential threat. The idea is that even on, you know, a long-term scale, the sun is going to burn out eventually, and the idea is that we need to sort of insure the future of humanity and so we need a sort of second place, to form a backup for civilization, for the species.
Because the sun will burn out eventually, so we damn well better get to Mars so that we can have a backup.
Terry Gross says she doesn’t know much about space travel but wouldn’t Elon Musk and the other people planning this be dead by then?
Good point but there’s a rather more basic one…
He goes on:
It’s about having a backup planet […] it’s not really about the individuals, it’s about you know preserving the species, it’s about if an asteroid hits earth or the sun explodes or whatever you want to have a backup planet for humanity.
And that will be Mars. A solar planet.
Neither of them noticed.
Okay, I thought at first you weren’t going to say it, but you did. Mars? If the sun burns out? That would help how?
And I wrote a play a few years ago about trying to terraform the moon – also an impossible fantasy. I was explaining to someone how we could save every ecosystem on earth for less than what it would take to keep two humans alive on the moon for any length of time. They looked at me like I’m crazy. So I explained that our success rate in building ecosystems on Earth, where we have all the materials needed, plus an atmosphere, plus water, plus the right soils, etc, and the weather, still is very low. We don’t actually know a lot about building ecosystems. They basically were in a kind of “what do you know?”: mode. I told them that is my specialty field – ecosystem management, restoration, and creation. They shrugged. If I didn’t agree with what they found on Google on the first page, I had to be wrong. Did I REALLY think I knew more than Google?
YES, DAMN IT. I KNOW MORE THAN GOOGLE…ESPECIALLY MORE THAN THE FIRST PAGE!!!! I SPENT YEARS OF MY LIFE STUDYING AND DOING IN THIS FIELD. Then I remembered. I am an expert…therefore, I must bow to those who know things other people don’t know. Listening to experts is not acceptable these days.
I’ve had this conversation before too. Remarkable how common it is. I’ve pointed out that it would be easier to establish permanent human residence in the most inhospitable place on Earth, or even under its oceans, than it would to establish such on Mars. Sending humans to other planets is a wasteful PR gimmick. If we want to know something, we can send a robot for less.
Those folks don’t really care; it’s a religious-type belief. And it’s common on both the right and the left.
I do like your point better than mine, iknklast. It’s relatively pointless to stick a human colony at the bottom of the ocean just because it would be easier than sticking one on Mars. Restoring ecosystems on our planet would be a much better use of our resources. But billionaires can’t seem to get behind that idea. Maybe it’s because rockets are so enticingly phallic.
If we are prepared to consider leaving the Earth we should be considering artificial habitats – large enough to contain a complete ecology but small enough to move out of the way of an asteroid or to move to a more comfortable location as the Sun gets hotter. We already know in a general way how to build them – see Gerard O’Neill’s The High Frontier (1976!) – and will know much more before the Sun becomes a problem. A society distributed among many habitats will be much more disaster-proof than one confined to a few planets.
Not to be the Skeletor of this thread (both because I’m nursing a repetitive stress flare-up from a writing marathon over the weekend and because I should by rights be working at the minute), but…space exploration has been a net positive for humanity, both technologically and economically, and at its height during the Cold War, NASA’s budget amounted to a piddling 4.41% of the federal US budget. That amount of investment, plus a bit of technology developed by the Nazis, got people to the moon and back and laid the groundwork for a technological revolution in communications that we have yet to fully realise. It also, incidentally, gave us these photos, which have done more to raise awareness of the finiteness and fragility of our planet than anything else we have ever done. That, in turn, has helped inspire a great deal of environmental concern and action, which is a fantastic thing.
These days, NASA’s budget (from the first link) has ticked under half a percent of the overall federal budget, or just about a whole order of magnitude reduction. All of the private investment from the dipshit captains of industry such as Musk cannot amount to very much more than this, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that the dipshits are somehow able to plow 1966-level money into their projects, as a percentage of the US budget.
That means that total investment in space exploration and colonisation amounts to no more than 5% of the total annual US budget. Now, I’m sure you’ll say that this amounts to an enormous amount of money in its own terms, and this money would do a great deal to alleviate poverty, or climate devastation, or extinction, or pollution, or food security. But you could say that about *anything else* in the budget, too, and there are many more wasteful and harmful pursuits which we allow our governments to throw away our money on than exploring and colonising other planets, and eventually other stars.
And even if we never spent another dime on space, and we shifted that money to any one of the pressing issues on the planet’s surface, we would not solve *any* of them with this investment alone. Make them better, lay the groundwork for solutions, get a good start…but climate change and food security and ecological devastation and alternative fuels and pandemic prevention are all enormous, interrelated, and terribly complicated fields which require a scientifically-minded population to spend the money on. And taking space exploration and colonisation away from the pool of attractors to science will do nothing to increase the proportion of science-minded citizens in that population, which will in turn reduce the number of people working on these issues, and also reduce the importance governments are pressured to place on them, et cetera, et cetera.
Further, it isn’t as if it’s zero-sum; the scientific effort required to build a habitable colony on the Moon or Mars will almost inevitably bring us more knowledge and technology for managing the Earth’s biome, and developing the technology required to get us to other stars will almost certainly revolutionise the way we interact with our own solar system as a whole.
Yes, Musk and Branson and Thiel et al. are dillweeds and publicity-mongers and dweebs, and yes even if their wildest dreams come true, only a small proportion of humanity will ever venture off of the Earth and into space, and therefore the great mass of us will need to deal with the problems here one way or another. And yes, obviously, humanity will have either gone extinct or evolved into an unrecognisable form by the the time the Sun gets hot enough to boil the water off of Earth (which isn’t all that far off, geologically speaking—between a half a billion and a billion years—and by which time Mars will incidentally become much more Earth-like in temperature).
But, as far as we know, we are the only species in the Universe (or at the very least the Local Group) which is able to look at the stars and recognise them within ourselves. And we are certain that an asteroid, or a comet, or a super volcano, or a plague, or a blight, or some other civilisation-ending catastrophe is coming. And we are faced with the choice of stoically accepting that we will sooner or later be wiped from the face of the Earth and therefore the Universe entire, or with striving to put ourselves among the stars.
On an evolutionary level, we are precisely adapted to, and inextricably part of our environment. Any lengthy space travel, or time spent on another planet, would require us to take a significant part of our environment with us. It would require traveling with complex environmental systems, not just breathable air, but varied sources of sustenance and water, proper gravity, protection from radiation and temperature extremes, a small society, and a few other things that we would absolutely need to survive. We are part of the delicate balance of the environment we live in and take for granted. Even an extended lack of proper gravity would be hugely problematic. Science fiction in the popular psyche has made extended space travel seem much easier than it actually would be, but we would have to address a ton of problems, mostly about how much of planet Earth we would have to take with us, before it would be even remotely (and then only temporarily) possible. The actual scientific problems cannot be ignored or glossed over (no matter how much money or imagination you have).
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/your_body_six_month_in_space_11_18_15_0.pdf
Seth, I don’t think anyone here is ridiculing all space engineering and research, just the silly idea that we ought to throw resources at colonising planets in the near future, and the very silly idea that colonising Mars will insure humans against the sun’s demise.
@5 reminds me of a plot point in Stardance, a novel I loved when I was a kid. I just went to look it up, and found this clip of experimental dance in zero-g:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7sk9dU5pvM
Also, as far as the sun burning out, that’s in (checks calendar) about five billion years. The Earth as such won’t get there – all the water will have boiled off long before. The sun is getting brighter, and hotter, at a fairly slow pace. Long before the sun burns out, Earth will be very close to its surface, and very hot. Life as we know it has maybe only about 3.5 billion years left on this planet.
3.5 billion years is a funny number, because that’s about how long ago the first life evolved on this planet. Is it far-fetched to think that life continues to evolve? (I concede that humans don’t seem to be doing much in the way of evolution lately). If there is intelligent life on this planet in around 3.5 billion years from now, I can’t imagine that it will resemble contemporary humans much more than we resemble bacteria.
Though my understanding of evolution and extinction is limited, the idea that homo sapiens will still be around even a half million years from now strikes me as, um, speculative. I think I read that for megafauna like us, a million years is already a pretty good run. We’re what, maybe 300k in already.
Seth, I do not dismiss space exploration. That is not what this is about. And I realize that restoring ecosystems through the market is a non-starter. But I have built ecosystems. I have worked with people who build ecosystems. I have studied under people who build ecosystems.
I had a project to try to establish an ecosystem in southeastern Oklahoma, in a lake that already existed, had some established soil, water, plants, atmosphere, etc. We tried two tactics to introduce the plants. We bought some from a nursery and we harvested some from another existing ecosystem in central Oklahoma that was similar to the ecosystem we were working with. We had to move the plants a 3-hour drive across mostly rural roads, stopping to water them along the way so they didn’t dessicate. They were taken with everything they needed to survive.
We failed to establish the community. We went WAY overbudget. The nursery plants fared worse; they didn’t establish at all. We managed to establish approximately 100 plants along a 1.5 mile stretch of the ecosystem. In short, scattered and sparse. Not a success.
We did not have to put them in a rocket and fly them from the earth to Mars, a much longer trip than 3 hours. We were establishing them in an ecosystem essentially identical to the one where they were harvested. These are hardy plants, able to withstand a lot. They didn’t survive. They didn’t establish.
In short, we are not talking about space exploration. We are talking about something we don’t know how to do even on Earth, at least not consistently. Yes, some of our efforts succeed. Most of them don’t. The ones that don’t often are done the same way as the ones that do, so we don’t exactly know why we didn’t succeed. We have a great than 80% failure rate WHEN WE HAVE ALL THE CONDITIONS NEEDED FOR AN ECOSYSTEM.
Building bubbles sounds all nice and high-techy, but we seem to forget that having the ability to build a space bubble does not mean we have the ability to fill it with plants and animals and make it work. We don’t.
And yes, NASAs budget is a small part of the overall GDP, the overall federal budget, etc. But at this point, NASA is not trying to build ecosystems. Exploration is one thing. Supporting life for an indefinite period of time on a planet without liquid water (Yes, I realize they found liquid water on Mars; it is a tiny amount, not enough to support us), with very little atmosphere, without the other things needed.
To make such a thing work, we need not only the plants and animals, but also a lot of fungus and bacteria that have co-evolved with these species. Insects would be nice, but some species that wind pollinate would not require them. It would be a more barren existence without the insect pollinated species, but might be able to maintain life; I don’t know, since I have never tried to live in a world without insects and insect pollinated plants.
In short, you are doing just what I described. You are insisting, to someone who does this for a living, to someone who has worked in this field for a long time, that you know better than I what we can do. I would like to request that you cease mansplaining. No, you are not being Skeletor, you are mansplaining.
Rant over. I’ll creep off to the dark side of the moon now and retreat to my sealed, human-built, richly diverse in life bubble. If there was such a thing.
Seth @ 4, I’m not dissing space exploration, at all, just 1. the blithe assumption that we can just pack a few crates and move to Mars and 2. the ridiculous assumption that Mars will be a refuge if the sun explodes.
I’m a huge fan of sending Rovers to Mars.
Something else that nobody has mentioned explicitly – climate change is also in the list of reasons to have a backup planet. As bad as climate change may get (very bad), it will never make Earth as inhospitable as Mars already is. I’ve come across this idea before (if climate change gets bad, we can terraform Mars!) from techno-libertarian types and it’s one of my pet peeves, because it’s so stupid. “I don’t want to make any sacrifices to try and tackle this large problem, so let’s tackle a vastly larger problem instead!”
Some of the things that space travel have helped us develop are long-distance communications and robotics, which have now developed to the point they have overtaken any plausible scientific purpose for sending people to other planets. Space exploration: yes. With people: no.
Maybe start with terraforming Antarctica. Piece of cake beside Mars.
At the risk of digging myself deeper, and in an attempt to be brief…no, I wasn’t doing any such thing.
I know that you are an expert in ecology and I am an expert in essentially nothing, and I don’t believe you can find any fair reading of my post to suggest I was asserting otherwise or that you (or OB or Papito) were wrong to be dismissive of Musk et al. and this badly-framed interview with two non-experts umm-ing and aww-ing their way through ill-formed questions. (The question of how Mars could be a backup for any sentient Earth life in re the Sun is a lot more complicated than just “the sun will go out one day and Mars will help that, somehow”, but I won’t sidetrack into that for fear of my ligaments and further accusations of mansplaining.)
More to the point I don’t think, and I don’t think you can read into my post, that we will have anything near to a permanent habitation outside of our atmosphere in our lifetimes, and probably not for hundreds of years. (Probably not ever, in fact.) I do not disagree with you at all about what we can do, and what is reasonable to extrapolate about what we will do, at least for the foreseeable future.
I’m only making the counterpoint that the dipshit billionaires aren’t costing that much in the grand scheme of things, and their overshooting of the mark is the kind of thing that inspires lots of people to try and make impossible things a reality. And further that, the dipshit billionaires’ dipshittery aside, this is a very good thing, at least when the topic is humans eventually expanding beyond our atmosphere.
Seth, I’m not sure billionaire dipshittery about Mars is a very good thing. It may serve as more of a distraction than an inspiration. Imagine a teenager who says he’s not going to clean up his room, instead he’s going to invent self-washing laundry. He’s unlikely ever to get there, and things will stink more and more in the meantime.
Imagine a billionaire who cared as much about reforestation as Elon does about Mars. Oh, wait, I don’t have to: Marc Benioff. One trillion trees might not fix everything, but it’s a lot better than blowing a bunch of resources into space.
There is a far better candidate for terraforming within easy reach that already is in pretty good shape to support human life for the foreseeable future. We could call it earth. With a firm commitment and a fraction of the cost of any other option, that planet could be cooled a touch and reworked into a paradise planet that would be uniquely suited to humankind. Work on more efficient power sources that produce less waste heat and invest a small fraction of the current world investment in weapons toward a reasonable system of asteroid detection and defense and we wouldn’t have to worry too much for, say, at least a billion years. To put it into perspective, a billion years in the past, life on earth consisted of procaryotes, a few eukaryotes and some fungus that was colonizing the land.
Isn’t it all a bit moot if we can’t even get a space elevator off the ground? There’s no question that Terra is too dangerous a place for humanity long (very long) term but if we can’t even survive long enough to build a space elevator then the whole issue of colonizing other celestial bodies is never going to come up.
Never going to come up, GEDDIT??
Ouch…
Blood Knight, in very long term there are no humans anymore. By the time a species on this planet gets a space elevator or some such, ah, erected, the predominant sentient species won’t resemble you and me. If any sentient life spreads from this planet to elsewhere in the galaxy, it won’t be human.
Our future descendants will still be human, they just won’t be like us. People think of humans (and other animals) as fixed things. We’re still an evolving species, we’re markedly different to our ancestors from just 40,000 years ago. In another 100,000 years humanity may be represented by something we consider more beautiful and intelligent than us or something we consider ugly and dumb. Evolution isn’t an escalator, lifting us to a higher plane, it’s a process reacting to our environment.
For my money FWIW, space exploration good. Long term goal of leaving plant good. Short term goal of fixing this plant better. Musk et al necessary evil in current socio political climate.
What’s being called for is a multi-generational enterprise that’s going to make the Apollo program look like a grade shool science fair project. Not saying it ain’t gonna happen, but these billionaire rocket boys are fooling themselves if they think they’re going to see a viable, self -sustaining colony anywhere off the Earth during their life-time. Let’s look at some of what stands in their way.
There is no capacity for construction or manufacturing of ANYTHING in space, or on the surface of another world. There is no capability or infrastructure for in situ production of water, atmosphere, or propellants on the Moon or Mars in the industrial quntities that would be required. There have been no tests of large scale farming in space. There have been no children born off the Earth. The ISS, just a few hundred kilometers overhead is not, and could not be made self-sustaining. For the forseeable future, everything a colony on the Moon or any other planet, or moon thereof, will have to be launched from Earth. That’s something that is still hard and expensive, and will remain so for a long time, Musk’s rocket shows notwithstanding. The heaviest single object ever launched into orbit by humans is Skylab (77,000 kg). The heaviest object humans have landed on another world is the Apollo Lunar Module (15,000 kg). The heaviest object we’ve landed on another planet has been the Curiousity rover on Mars (1,000 kg). Vehicles that don’t have to lift off again can weigh more than those meant for a return trip. Anything that has to carry humans has to be MUCH heavier, and also has additional constraints on the liftoff and landing profiles to keep the g-loads imposed on human crew within acceptable limits. These are just the things I could think of off the top of my head, and I’m no engineer, or biologist or rocket scientist.
The resources required to do this in the near future are better spent on securing the Earth. Right now, space colonies are lifeboats to nowhere; it would be nice if we could slow down the rate at which we’re drilling holes in the ship we’re sailing on bfore we started to work on plans to abandon it for the illusory safety of distant, lifeless rocks. Unless and until the conditions on Earth are stabilized, and made ecologically, politically and materially equitable for all of its inhabitants, human and otherwise, space colonies are a frivolous distraction, not a saving grace. Maybe civilization is a passing phase; most of human existence took place before civilization arose. The price of civilization has been steep for humans and many other life forms. Its current incarnation and implementation is manifestly fundamentally, suicidally unsustainable. This is a state which must be acknowledged, addressed, and resolved. This is beyond the ability of tinkering with technological fixes. A space colony with roots in such delusional, un-reformed civilization is likely to carry the same flaws with it into space.
Humans evolved and thrived in a supporting ecosystems within a planetary biosphere, not in a tin can. We have no good evidence that we can recreate the former in the latter. In the initial set-up phase of a Mars colony, prospective colonists would be dependent on Earth re-supply. This is a recipe for disaster. Any prolonged interruption, or disruption of this slender thread through space would result in a scenario for the would-be Martians that would be a mix of the Franklin Expedition and the Donner Party, but with microwave ovens.
Having grown up during the Gemini and Apollo programs, I used tobe a real space fanboi, and I’m still thrilled by what we are capable of. But dreams of space settlements are at best premature and at worst an unaffordable , distracting luxury that could keep us from doing the hard work needed to make Earth a safe, longer term home. If we won’t save Earth from ourselves, we deserve no other home.
Ophelia at #11:
I’m a huge fan of sending DT, Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani along with Boris and his boys and a host of others to Mars. Or even better on another Explorer mission. Get to work, NASA!
Niether modern Chernobyl nor modern New Zealand is self-contained. Both have roots that extend far into the global economy, which is itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of the global environment of Planet Earth. The atmosphere-hydrosphere-biosphere-lithosphere-cryosphere complex is just that: the most complex system we know about anywhere in the Universe.
Musings by some zillionaire that a small slice of our biosphere could be taken and grafted onto Mars after the Earth has been cooked by an expanding sun in its own stellar dotage are interesting bed-time reading I suppose. But they make one or two (hundred) assumptions not included in any footnotes, and of which such speculative thinkers may not be aware: in their own thought.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840906009/author-tours-the-end-of-the-world-from-prairie-bunkers-to-apocalypse-mansions
Pretty much the only consoling thought I have left at this point – well, apart from the general impermanence of all things – is that the rest of the Universe should be quite safe from human stupidity and evil.
So, we’re mostly harmless then?
Only in the sense that we’re almost certainly going to self-destruct before going anywhere else. If humans did find a way to spread beyond the Earth, the rest of the Universe better hope the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax get to them before we do.