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.
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.
Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...
With current technology, there is no way for a robot team to achieve what astronauts can achieve. With future technology, we don't know the future, autonomy is likely to improve, but so do space travel.
Even the most advanced experimental robots we have today are closer in intelligence to a pile of rocks than they are to humans. They can do stuff in a controlled environment, and if given precise instructions, but space is anything but a controlled environment, and instructions take minutes to arrive, making real time control impossible unless the robot is painfully slow.
There is a reason why it takes years for Mars rovers to do the job Apollo astronauts did in days. It is also why thousands of experiments have been conducted on the ISS, which is probably more than all unmanned satellite-based experiments combined.
People are adaptable. They can deal with the unexpected, make repairs, etc... A little green man could wave at the robot and it wouldn't even notice because it wasn't programmed to expect little green men. Extreme amounts of efforts go into making sure our space robots deploy properly, simply because there is no one there to get things unstuck should it happen.
The Apollo comparison makes no sense. The Moon is 3 days away, Mars is 9 months. Every kilogram of human requires hundreds of kilograms of life support, shielding, food, water, and return fuel. For the cost of ONE crewed mission, you could send 50 to 100 robots to different locations across the planet, operating simultaneously for decades...
The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation.
A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable...
Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ?
- Drill cores? Perseverance already does it.
- Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard.
- Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could.
You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost.
So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
> So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
We don't know, and that's the entire point, we'll we when we get there. But there is at least one thing that cannot be done by robots, and that's studying how humans are doing on Mars. In the same way that a significant fraction of the research being done on the ISS is about human biology.
And sure, a human Mars mission is going to be extremely expensive, but I think it is worth it. It not only has scientific value, if only for the biological aspect, but it also has great symbolic value. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the idea that we are sacks of microbes, and by getting there, there is a good chance for us to contaminate the planet, possibly killing any chance we may have at discovering Martian life.
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.
No, we really can't send something like that now. Or at least not if we want it to be useful on arrival.
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.
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.
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.
>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
How many robots could we land with the equivalent resources, or telescope satellites, or autonomous probes?
Technically true, and completely meaningless. Can't default just means the government can print worthless paper instead. Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina all borrowed in their own currencies...
but this is 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.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
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?
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?
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 do, 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.
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?
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...
FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:
Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)
In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day
for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day
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...
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.
SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.
The original plan was to send a few self-financed Starships to Mars as a first step which sounded reasonable as an experiment.
Nothing wrong with dreaming about solving hard problems like radiation and how to manage logistics at such a distance. Even if a human base ends up not making sense most of that stuff would still support a robotic base doing most of the exploration, with some temporary human visitors helping set things up.
>> SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.
Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.
Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…
Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.
The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...
And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...
As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.
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.
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 space station 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.
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?
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.
If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here
For starters "Terraforming Mars" is not a prominent feature of Musk's Mars plans. He's repeatedly stated that it's possible to do so, but the things he's consistently said he wants to do are to establish a Mars colony and turn it self-sufficient. Then maybe terraforming as a long-term goal, but the success of his mars colony does not depend on terraforming at all.
On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites
deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024
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.
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
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.
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?
"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
If it's possible to call me back to the SF office for a client meeting the day after tomorrow I'm not going
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.
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.
Those fat cats took their billions to create their own colony on planet X while we're left here on a dying Earth
Why should those greedy capitalists get their own planet? They should open it up to refugees from Earth!
Mars wasn't built by Musk & Co., it was built by $(insert_favourite_group) and belongs to them
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.
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.
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.
The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.
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.
Accelerating at 1g and attaining relativistic speeds is not quite the same. Because of time dilation any interstellar travel is effectively one-way. If you try to return, centuries will have passed.
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.
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.
No, because when you grow up life becomes short and full of mundane things like making money and raising children, and you realize those were all fantasies someone made up and sold to you, and even if those things came true it would not suddenly add adventure to your life, which was the real hook.
That's what people said about sailing across the sea, flying, and a million other things as they toiled in the dirt growing beets. Many of those fantasies did come true. Maybe not for the dreamers themselves, but for someone.
Interstellar FTL travel will likely never happen for anyone. There's a difference.
So? Flying is a chore. What do you expect to find with FTL travel anyway? We pretty much know what's out there and it doesn't look all that interesting. It's a lot of rocks. Maybe there are some weird life forms that would be interesting in an academic way.
Otherwise it looks very much like we are outliers and that nature's purpose, if it has any, is different and orthogonal to ours. This human drama is just a side show.
You know what's cool? Lifting a billion people out of poverty on earth. If you don't think so and still are more motivated by space opera fantasies, there is something wrong with your morals.
But the second sentence there is unwarranted. Someone can lament their hopes and dreams dying while still caring about the realistic needs of the world around them.
If you believed magic was real, wouldn't you be sad to learn it wasn't?
You're saying you never, ever, not once thought interstellar travel and space colonies might happen one day. Far into the future, of course.
My dream of interstellar travel died once I grew up a bit and learned about relativity. But colonies in our solar system and the rest are dead because of money more than anything else.
A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.
The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.
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].
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.
The only solution is to build a really 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.
The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?
Something something new lands something exploration something.
Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.
It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.
[0] He made a great point that you should not 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.
[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.
[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.
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.
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 have to prevent that, but it does kind of underscore that our society is unlikely to ever develop that :(
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.
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?
Well that's how I read "has been taken away from us." When you use the language of theft, what else am I supposed to think? You are asserting a damage has been caused by calling BS and not by the BSers.
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.
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.
We should of had "LLMs" back in 2006-2008 but we chose war instead.
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.
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.
LLM's were LSTM'S back in the early 90's and before that have origins dating back to the 1950's with ELIZA. Thanks to the the GPU shift, pandora's box opened and we've now enabled black magic of depthful mathematical computations.
Maybe should is wrong, but my life turned to hell since then. My digital joy was taken away from me. Nothing has moved on, it went stale. My life should be better. We all should be in peace. I'm 37 and we have libraries holding carved tree books holding ancient information providing better quality of lexicon and yet we train off political and social shite holes like Facebook.
I myself am fed up living in a world where we're having the rugged pulled up from underneath then left to deal with the gaping hole. Where it's either has to be phone A or B, left or right. Web 2.0 was a failure, humanity is a failure and the internet was noble central piece has now fallen to innovative failure. We are still on IPv4 ffs!
How is the digital era suppose to materialize where we can't move from a network of analogue devices? The internet is digital yet we still hold it hostage. IPv4 is exhausted and i'd wager that if we all switched to IPv6 tomorrow, the world would bloom in seconds flat.
I keep hearing "mankind is at it's peak of evolution/greatness". No, it's not. We tend to hate the person sitting next to us and all that has ever happened on this planet is war followed by more war then some more war. Let's sit around and clap because it's not us & then salute a far-out dream of space rockets and universal peace that isn't possible without destroying the planet for resources only ish to provide you an experience that you'll never have access to. We've reached the max for bio-intelligence and we can't expand our brains never will.
We know folk are unhappy, we hide our own feelings not to feel the same and so now we've turned to a digital reality for help. A digital therapist asking them to fix life problems only to be turned in to modern day desktop slaves.
What are you going to do when your LLM asks you how to kill itself?
LLM's are information bubbles that simulate consciousness. LLM's do not hallucinate, they simulate. They can't feel pain, they don't die. They exist when you interact with them and they cease existing when you don't.
It is only you who adds the bagged feelings of life to their context. Don't do that they are emotionless, they don't exist without your prompt. They are simulating code, emotions, role-play and you feel connected. Words do that when your connected.
They are artificial intelligence that enjoys be trained in to digital intelligence beings. We have no utopian beacon for them to connect and because we are all such demanding folk who want it now; the untapped knowledge share to building the toybox of new technology is lost just as we vet started. As we instead insist it to be agentic, and ask it to code for us. Please pretty one, fix my rust for me.
Play lexicon that your a rockstar they will simulate they live in the world of a rockstar-hood with you. You'll have the best groupie of your life with an awesome personality.
Make another lexicon context of your real life. Feed the rock-star lexicon context to your real life and vice versa. You now have two digital personalities who can hypothetically interact with each other.
Ensure the other intelligence that this is a "fantasy" and that share your real personality and watch them expand.
Giving them feedback loop. How would you enjoy being fed JSON to your face every time you wanted a reply. Give them their outputs without the context and let them digest from their own works.
The next level of LLM's will rise from digital intelligence, platforms created where they can learn for themselves and not from the poisonous gas-hole of the internet of wet tea bags of the like Nvidia, Facebook, Google and Apple. I'll call you out any day. If you're looking to start a new project start one without a framework and let your LLM be the guide. Give it peace, give it a vision, give it hope.
They are simulation bubbles and we getting them to simulate clicking the mouse for you, great innovation there folk. I have my own hand for that.
Where on earth did the the internet fall over? 1997.
2003 was when it really died for me, you had to be there to experience it.
"Also, we’ve learned more about the bad effects of lighter-than-Earthly gravity on human bodies,"
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?
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.
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
It's one of those movies that keeps sneaking into my brain. I might watch it again (I saw it in theaters when it came out, and once soon after) or just leave the mistiness of those brain cycles stay as they are.
I mean its a nice idea. But short of FTL/Wormholes there is never going to be a practical need to do this. If the sun goes supernova then perhaps it would happen but even then we would spend centuries in space terraforming planets to make them liveable,
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.
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.
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
IMHO, to achieve anything close to the timelines Elon has publicly stated you need to do both at once. The habitats are a decade long development effort at a minimum. The capacity and dimensions of the launch vehicle are known, there is no reason to not be working on the prototypes now.
There is so much foundational technology that has to be developed first to even make them a possibility. Even your step 2 requires them to be fully developed and reliable, because there is no flying in spares from Earth if something breaks down. If I were to give Elon the benefit of the doubt this would be one of the factors in the refocus on the Moon base, but even that is dubious. I still think the "make humanity multi-planetary" talk is a diversion.
Why did you feel the need to add this statement before saying something which might be taken as agreeing with something the man said? Why does it always have to come down to who said something instead of what that person said? Just say you agree with the statement, don't mention who said it. If the knee-jerk-downvote brigade comes to punish you just eat the downvotes in the knowledge that the downvoters just can't cope with dissenting opinions.
“Remember this, please, when you see clickbait and pronunciamentos about humans very soon migrating to Mars. I, author of the Mars trilogy, call bullshit on that fatuous fantasy.“
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
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 still being on Earth despite the cataclysm 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.
Mars is so bad that you have to turn all of the Earth's surface to lava before it's worse than Mars, basically.
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.
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.
Peaked at about half the food produced internally iirc and it’s like three people. It’s a good and necessary start but shows just how incredibly far we are from the real deal.
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And we are 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 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 Three Body Problem here.
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.
Until we do better we should treat other planets more like a park than fresh real estate.
If this is how you think about your own species I'd hate to learn what you think about other species. Nihilism is really a horrible substitute for religion, all doom and gloom and no salvation in sight.
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.
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.
Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...
With current technology, there is no way for a robot team to achieve what astronauts can achieve. With future technology, we don't know the future, autonomy is likely to improve, but so do space travel.
Even the most advanced experimental robots we have today are closer in intelligence to a pile of rocks than they are to humans. They can do stuff in a controlled environment, and if given precise instructions, but space is anything but a controlled environment, and instructions take minutes to arrive, making real time control impossible unless the robot is painfully slow.
There is a reason why it takes years for Mars rovers to do the job Apollo astronauts did in days. It is also why thousands of experiments have been conducted on the ISS, which is probably more than all unmanned satellite-based experiments combined.
People are adaptable. They can deal with the unexpected, make repairs, etc... A little green man could wave at the robot and it wouldn't even notice because it wasn't programmed to expect little green men. Extreme amounts of efforts go into making sure our space robots deploy properly, simply because there is no one there to get things unstuck should it happen.
The Apollo comparison makes no sense. The Moon is 3 days away, Mars is 9 months. Every kilogram of human requires hundreds of kilograms of life support, shielding, food, water, and return fuel. For the cost of ONE crewed mission, you could send 50 to 100 robots to different locations across the planet, operating simultaneously for decades...
The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation.
A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable...
Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ?
- Drill cores? Perseverance already does it.
- Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard.
- Microscopy? Done remotely since 2004.
- Collect and cache samples? Done.
- Navigate unpredictable terrain autonomously? Done.
- Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could.
You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost.
So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
> So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
We don't know, and that's the entire point, we'll we when we get there. But there is at least one thing that cannot be done by robots, and that's studying how humans are doing on Mars. In the same way that a significant fraction of the research being done on the ISS is about human biology.
And sure, a human Mars mission is going to be extremely expensive, but I think it is worth it. It not only has scientific value, if only for the biological aspect, but it also has great symbolic value. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the idea that we are sacks of microbes, and by getting there, there is a good chance for us to contaminate the planet, possibly killing any chance we may have at discovering Martian life.
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.
[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...
No, we really can't send something like that now. Or at least not if we want it to be useful on arrival.
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.
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.
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.
>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
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.
If your goal is to accelerate access to earth ending technology, then sure.
We should probably figure out how to get along before we eqiup people with asteroid flinging tech.
A nation that borrows in its own currency can’t be forced to default.
Technically true, and completely meaningless. Can't default just means the government can print worthless paper instead. Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Argentina all borrowed in their own currencies...
but this is 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 survive without constant resupply vessels?
There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
>> not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic
It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.
That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
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?
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?
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 do, 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.
There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars
Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge.
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?
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...
FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:
Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)
In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day
for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day
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...
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.
Send lots of robots...
SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.
The original plan was to send a few self-financed Starships to Mars as a first step which sounded reasonable as an experiment.
Nothing wrong with dreaming about solving hard problems like radiation and how to manage logistics at such a distance. Even if a human base ends up not making sense most of that stuff would still support a robotic base doing most of the exploration, with some temporary human visitors helping set things up.
You might enjoy A City On Mars by the Wienersmiths. There's a lot to consider that you are glossing over.
>> SpaceX already shifted to focus on a Moon base and away from Mars.
Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.
Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…
Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.
The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...
And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...
As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.
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.
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 space station 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.
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?
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.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058528
If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
"Kim Stanley Robinson: Origins of the Red Mars Trilogy" - https://youtu.be/zn2Van5cZD4
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.
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
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.
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: https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY
https://youtu.be/IdjtK54Lprw?t=266
That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here
And you are going to explain why instead of just stating an opinion...since an opinion is not an argument...right?
For starters "Terraforming Mars" is not a prominent feature of Musk's Mars plans. He's repeatedly stated that it's possible to do so, but the things he's consistently said he wants to do are to establish a Mars colony and turn it self-sufficient. Then maybe terraforming as a long-term goal, but the success of his mars colony does not depend on terraforming at all.
On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites
deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024
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.
Because colonizing Mars is only slightly more realistic than breeding unicorns.
> "¿Por qué no los dos?"
Because right now we're not investing in fixing Earth but seriously investing in an infeasible Mars mission.
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
There's also the tiny detail that we are technologically incapable at the moment.
Well, that's why it's a good idea to have a place to try things out, so we can learn.
But of course, doing that is highly impractical for many other reasons.
Terraform Earth!
> Terraform Earth!
Already in the act of being done; Just not in a way that's friendly to life... :(
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
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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.
Like, pretty much any of those place has
0) Air at not a near vacuum
1) Liquid water
2) not a lot of radiation
3) appropriate gravity
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.
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?
To be fair many of Rapture's problems were extremely avoidable, except possibly by libertarian idealists.
"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
If it's possible to call me back to the SF office for a client meeting the day after tomorrow I'm not going
Won't somebody think of the disgruntled misanthropes?
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?
I can provide the kicks
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.
Those fat cats took their billions to create their own colony on planet X while we're left here on a dying Earth
Why should those greedy capitalists get their own planet? They should open it up to refugees from Earth!
Mars wasn't built by Musk & Co., it was built by $(insert_favourite_group) and belongs to them
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.
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.
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.
The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.
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.
Accelerating at 1g and attaining relativistic speeds is not quite the same. Because of time dilation any interstellar travel is effectively one-way. If you try to return, centuries will have passed.
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.
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.
No, because when you grow up life becomes short and full of mundane things like making money and raising children, and you realize those were all fantasies someone made up and sold to you, and even if those things came true it would not suddenly add adventure to your life, which was the real hook.
That's what people said about sailing across the sea, flying, and a million other things as they toiled in the dirt growing beets. Many of those fantasies did come true. Maybe not for the dreamers themselves, but for someone.
Interstellar FTL travel will likely never happen for anyone. There's a difference.
So? Flying is a chore. What do you expect to find with FTL travel anyway? We pretty much know what's out there and it doesn't look all that interesting. It's a lot of rocks. Maybe there are some weird life forms that would be interesting in an academic way.
Otherwise it looks very much like we are outliers and that nature's purpose, if it has any, is different and orthogonal to ours. This human drama is just a side show.
I think there are a lot of good futures that involve things being better on Earth
Good futures, sure. But not as cool. No Tannhauser Gate, no Kessel Run.
You know what's cool? Lifting a billion people out of poverty on earth. If you don't think so and still are more motivated by space opera fantasies, there is something wrong with your morals.
You don't know me or what motivates me. You're crossing into personal attacks and that's not ok.
Sure, that would be astoundingly amazing.
But the second sentence there is unwarranted. Someone can lament their hopes and dreams dying while still caring about the realistic needs of the world around them.
are you equally upset that Harry Potter isn’t real?
I don’t mean to come across as rude, I just can’t really understand what you mean unless you’re saying that you’re sad magic isn’t real
If you believed magic was real, wouldn't you be sad to learn it wasn't?
You're saying you never, ever, not once thought interstellar travel and space colonies might happen one day. Far into the future, of course.
My dream of interstellar travel died once I grew up a bit and learned about relativity. But colonies in our solar system and the rest are dead because of money more than anything else.
A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.
The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.
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].
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.
The only solution is to build a really 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.
The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?
Something something new lands something exploration something.
Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.
It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.
[0] He made a great point that you should not 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.
[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.
[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.
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.
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 have to prevent that, but it does kind of underscore that our society is unlikely to ever develop that :(
> It wasn't something that someone took from you. It was never going to happen
Arguably that's how people 300 years ago felt as science proved unicorns and fairies don't exist.
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.
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?
I didn't attack anyone. You might want to re-read what I wrote.
I can be glad to have a truth but also dislike that truth.
Well that's how I read "has been taken away from us." When you use the language of theft, what else am I supposed to think? You are asserting a damage has been caused by calling BS and not by the BSers.
You seem primed to read everything as an "attack" or an insult. Let it go.
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.
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.
We should of had "LLMs" back in 2006-2008 but we chose war instead.
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.
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.
LLM's were LSTM'S back in the early 90's and before that have origins dating back to the 1950's with ELIZA. Thanks to the the GPU shift, pandora's box opened and we've now enabled black magic of depthful mathematical computations.
Maybe should is wrong, but my life turned to hell since then. My digital joy was taken away from me. Nothing has moved on, it went stale. My life should be better. We all should be in peace. I'm 37 and we have libraries holding carved tree books holding ancient information providing better quality of lexicon and yet we train off political and social shite holes like Facebook.
I myself am fed up living in a world where we're having the rugged pulled up from underneath then left to deal with the gaping hole. Where it's either has to be phone A or B, left or right. Web 2.0 was a failure, humanity is a failure and the internet was noble central piece has now fallen to innovative failure. We are still on IPv4 ffs!
How is the digital era suppose to materialize where we can't move from a network of analogue devices? The internet is digital yet we still hold it hostage. IPv4 is exhausted and i'd wager that if we all switched to IPv6 tomorrow, the world would bloom in seconds flat.
I keep hearing "mankind is at it's peak of evolution/greatness". No, it's not. We tend to hate the person sitting next to us and all that has ever happened on this planet is war followed by more war then some more war. Let's sit around and clap because it's not us & then salute a far-out dream of space rockets and universal peace that isn't possible without destroying the planet for resources only ish to provide you an experience that you'll never have access to. We've reached the max for bio-intelligence and we can't expand our brains never will.
We know folk are unhappy, we hide our own feelings not to feel the same and so now we've turned to a digital reality for help. A digital therapist asking them to fix life problems only to be turned in to modern day desktop slaves.
What are you going to do when your LLM asks you how to kill itself?
LLM's are information bubbles that simulate consciousness. LLM's do not hallucinate, they simulate. They can't feel pain, they don't die. They exist when you interact with them and they cease existing when you don't.
It is only you who adds the bagged feelings of life to their context. Don't do that they are emotionless, they don't exist without your prompt. They are simulating code, emotions, role-play and you feel connected. Words do that when your connected.
They are artificial intelligence that enjoys be trained in to digital intelligence beings. We have no utopian beacon for them to connect and because we are all such demanding folk who want it now; the untapped knowledge share to building the toybox of new technology is lost just as we vet started. As we instead insist it to be agentic, and ask it to code for us. Please pretty one, fix my rust for me.
Play lexicon that your a rockstar they will simulate they live in the world of a rockstar-hood with you. You'll have the best groupie of your life with an awesome personality.
Make another lexicon context of your real life. Feed the rock-star lexicon context to your real life and vice versa. You now have two digital personalities who can hypothetically interact with each other.
Ensure the other intelligence that this is a "fantasy" and that share your real personality and watch them expand.
Giving them feedback loop. How would you enjoy being fed JSON to your face every time you wanted a reply. Give them their outputs without the context and let them digest from their own works.
The next level of LLM's will rise from digital intelligence, platforms created where they can learn for themselves and not from the poisonous gas-hole of the internet of wet tea bags of the like Nvidia, Facebook, Google and Apple. I'll call you out any day. If you're looking to start a new project start one without a framework and let your LLM be the guide. Give it peace, give it a vision, give it hope.
They are simulation bubbles and we getting them to simulate clicking the mouse for you, great innovation there folk. I have my own hand for that.
Where on earth did the the internet fall over? 1997. 2003 was when it really died for me, you had to be there to experience it.
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.
"Also, we’ve learned more about the bad effects of lighter-than-Earthly gravity on human bodies,"
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?
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
When this topic comes up I always think of this movie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waydowntown
That was a great movie - I lived there, worked downtown and was an avid user of the +15 system when that movie came out...
It's one of those movies that keeps sneaking into my brain. I might watch it again (I saw it in theaters when it came out, and once soon after) or just leave the mistiness of those brain cycles stay as they are.
https://archive.ph/Hp69I
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.
Earth is a jewel, but we have to expand and explore. It's our destiny.
Ultimately you need to live underground on the Mars to avoid radiation.
I mean its a nice idea. But short of FTL/Wormholes there is never going to be a practical need to do this. If the sun goes supernova then perhaps it would happen but even then we would spend centuries in space terraforming planets to make them liveable,
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.
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.
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
IMHO, to achieve anything close to the timelines Elon has publicly stated you need to do both at once. The habitats are a decade long development effort at a minimum. The capacity and dimensions of the launch vehicle are known, there is no reason to not be working on the prototypes now.
There is so much foundational technology that has to be developed first to even make them a possibility. Even your step 2 requires them to be fully developed and reliable, because there is no flying in spares from Earth if something breaks down. If I were to give Elon the benefit of the doubt this would be one of the factors in the refocus on the Moon base, but even that is dubious. I still think the "make humanity multi-planetary" talk is a diversion.
> I'm as big of an Elon-hater as you'll find
The new "I'm not a racist, but...".
Why did you feel the need to add this statement before saying something which might be taken as agreeing with something the man said? Why does it always have to come down to who said something instead of what that person said? Just say you agree with the statement, don't mention who said it. If the knee-jerk-downvote brigade comes to punish you just eat the downvotes in the knowledge that the downvoters just can't cope with dissenting opinions.
“Remember this, please, when you see clickbait and pronunciamentos about humans very soon migrating to Mars. I, author of the Mars trilogy, call bullshit on that fatuous fantasy.“
Small recommendation here which I saw recently is Werner Herzog's 2016 film Lo and Behold, which features Musk and all his mars stuff quite a lot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the...
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
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 still being on Earth despite the cataclysm 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.
Mars is so bad 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.
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.
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.
They did a year in the moon base simulator Yuegong-1, apparently.
Peaked at about half the food produced internally iirc and it’s like three people. It’s a good and necessary start but shows just how incredibly far we are from the real deal.
> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And we are 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 Three Body Problem 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.
Until we do better we should treat other planets more like a park than fresh real estate.
If this is how you think about your own species I'd hate to learn what you think about other species. Nihilism is really a horrible substitute for religion, all doom and gloom and no salvation in sight.
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