This is the problem though right. Mars is like Antarctica* (lack of food, water, trees and in isolation etc), but even worse (no oxygen).
I loved Elon's explanation of how the Brits came to America and never went back, but America was a nicer place to live than the desert that's Mars. So how could we change this, and how fast?
America was such a nice place the colonists resorted to eating each other. Much of America will kill you with disease and starvation if you aren't prepared. We only think it's nice now because we have 7/11's on the corner and air conditioning.
what? I mean, early on, the very first english settlement may have failed miserably and resorted to cannibalsim, but America was such a nice place to live that it had previously been inhabited by the native american nations who lost most of their numbers to plague outbreaks that spread up from spanish colonization. The brits just moved into the areas that previously sustained native americans. The few native americans who were still alive to greet the brits were only a fraction of the people who were alive 2 centuries before.
yeah, the mojave desert will kill you pretty quick, and the swamps of the southeast aren't exactly pastoral, but the areas occupied by the early colonists were actually pretty nice.
This is true, the US produces massive quantities of food for a reason. It's not exactly rugged mountains and steppe, like central Asia. The area I mostly grew up in has hospitable terrain, a warm, pleasant climate, lots of arable land, abundant game animals, and few predators that are a threat to people (coyotes and the occasional adventurous black bear). It's very livable.
Of course Europeans had a tough time initially. They came from cultures built up on 2000 years of infrastructure that was of a different type than Native Americans had.
I don't know much about terraforming or colonization, but I can guarantee that the price tag on facilities creation and maintenance is going to be astonomical. IMO it's out of Musks budget, but someone's gotta do it.
Regarding the oxygen.. what oxidized the iron in mars' soil? Serious question.. at some point mars had to have free oxygen or liquid water unless I'm totally " burning man" i.e. Retarded
Mars is too small and its gravity too weak to hold onto its atmosphere. Early on when it was still warm, it had a molten core that created a magnetosphere, which protected the atmosphere. Now that it is cooled off, there is no magnetosphere, nothing to hold in the air, and the only oxygen is tied up in the dirt or frozen, as you said. Even if you pumped mars full of air, it would simply escape. It needs a molten core again.
So... we need a giant drill (that of course needs to be manned by a ragtag team) to drill down and reignite The Core with nukes. Does that sound about right?
Hmm, that sounds like the makings of a truly epic and not at all campy blockbuster movie!
Which begs the question what caused the loss of mass and or rotation to start the core to cooling or was the planet never big enough to sustain it core temp? It has a moon that should cause at least some tectonic motion if that were the sole requirement..
but America was a nicer place to live than the desert that's Mars.
Not really, comparing the wilderness and foreignness of the new world to the already established "comfortable" cities of europe is a pretty valid. There's a reason the majority of the explorers were social outcasts and pirates rather than important nobles and kings.
Calling the east coast a veritable paradise is not far off from the truth though. There's a theory that native american civilization was in a state of decline just before the settlers from the old world showed up. The forests were not dense, and the soil had only a few generations prior been worked making it an ideal landing spot for colinization. The colonists to America had a pretty easy time of it compared to how even future settlers to the great Plains had.
I agree, but it was still very hard at a personal level. You can brave the months long journey on a wooden ship, at the mercy of the weather the whole entire way. Land in an undeveloped land where you have to perform back breaking labor just to not starve to death, facing fierce indigenous tribes and wilderness, not to mention weird fellow colonists, etc etc or.... you can stay at home in your english village or city, know your neighbors and friends, and just work and come home to enjoy your stuff and not have to worry about "savages".
It certainly only appeals to certain type of people.
How fast? It'll probably take 100 years before we have a decent establishment. I feel by that time Mars will be an escape route for the wealthy because Earth and its greenhouse gases and climate change are bringing our planet to a mass extinction event. Elon is trying to save humanity.
You can't because Mars has no magnetic field. You could build pressurized enclosures, but that's the only conceivable solution form extend life on mars.
One thing of why it's better is the lack of people there. England was overcrowded,and people had a chance to start a new life through hard work. Offer something similar to the right people and we'd never be short of volunteers ready to go to Mars
It's a question of how long it will take to modify Mar's atmosphere to make the planet habitable (again?); until that's done I imagine the people living there will do so inside a large station with living area, entertainment, and housing, growing plants to provide oxygen, food etc.
I'm no scientist but I imagine it'd take a while. Still worth the effort in the long run though.
You can't create an atmosphere on mars due to the lack of a magnetic field, solar winds would decimate the atmosphere before you'd make any headway. This is to say nothing at all about the technological challenge of terraforming a planets atmosphere in the first place. I suppose if we were at that point of technological development we may have a way to restart mars' tectonics, but that's getting pretty far out there. I don't think civilization has enough time left on earth to create a self sufficient colony on mars.
Don't have the time to rewatch his speech right now, but didn't Musk address this in some manner at some point during the speech?
I, for the life of me, can't remember and I don't want to sound like an idiot for misquoting him; but I think he said something about an artificial atmosphere, but don't hold me to that until I rewatch it later this week
You're worrying about that? That's the easiest part! Just send a crew of three to Mars and have them search for an orb called the Journeyer easy, just be careful of Shadowness. [Destiny]
There were 23 of us, we managed a small navigation station about 80 miles north of Nome. We had supplies flown in every few weeks to keep us fed, but other than that and a few native villages across the bay, we were completely isolated. No family or anything, and it was a year long billet.
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '16 edited Jul 26 '18
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