This is why manned missions to Mars need to happen.

Where are you getting this from? Anyway, there's enough resources in space to support a population of trillions with a US standard of living.

I think it was from an article in National Geography years ago. Not sure if it is still valid.

Anyways, that has always been the reason for my support for space exploration: there's much more resources out there than on Earth.

I'm not sure that inundating everyone with consumerist shit that they don't need until they go broke trying to pay for treatment for junk food-induced health issues and end up living under a bridge is a worthy endeavour...

How about we just explore because we're curious?

Yeah I wouldn't want everyone to live like they live in the US. :/

This is a bit of an obsession of mine, but if the problem is that we need more space to expand to, the underground is the way to go.

It is technically challenging, but nowhere as challenging as colonizing Mars or even the Moon; it contains a lot of useful resources; the commute with Earth surface is better; and colonizing the underground would give us quite a bit of the technical know-how that we'd need in order to colonize efficiently extraterrestrial objects.

Yeah, but it doesn't solve the eggs/baskets issue.

No event catastrophic enough to threaten us has happened in the last several million years (65, I'd say, if we count from the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event — and I think that a technological species such as us could have survived that, albeit not easily). Yeah, eventually we need to expand outside of Earth, or for that matter outside of the Solar System; but doing it right is more important than doing it quickly — statistically speaking, we can be reasonably confident that no such event will happen in the next 500 years or so.

A martian colony built now would hardly be independent on Earth; and it would be incredibly expensive, eating resources that could be better used otherwise.

edited 10th Jul '12 4:09:26 AM by Carciofus

I take it the Toba catastrophe doesn't count? It almost wiped out humanity as a species 74,000 years ago.

As in there was less than 5000 people on the PLANET after that. (Some projections suggest it was less than 1000. How's that for an Adam and Eve Plot?)

It would not threaten us now, I think. We have the technology to survive that. I am not entirely sure if we could survive the K-Pg extinction event, on the other hand (I actually just got inspired to make a new thread in OTC about that, as a matter of fact).

edited 10th Jul '12 4:40:42 AM by Carciofus

With events like these the past is pretty much irrelevant: there are dirty great rocks out there that could end us without much warning at all. Certainly a Martian colony would not be independent to begin with, but it would be a start.

"Not independent" is an euphemism. As of now, post-impact Earth would almost certainly still be far more hospitable than this hypothetical Martial colony, I think.

edited 10th Jul '12 4:49:10 AM by Carciofus

Yes, but nonetheless: 'inhospitable Martian colony' represents infinitely more progress than 'no Martian colony'.

Actually it would. The Toba eruption 74,000 years ago was basically the biggest volcanic eruption in 760,000 years. It was a supereruption class kinda like the worst case scenarios for Yellowstone.

A supereruption would instantaneously change the climate meaning many areas no longer would support agriculture owing to global cooling induced drought. (Which means North America, Asia and Australia and areas around that are now in extreme famine because things like the monsoons dried up.) It would easily be a Class 1 on the scale. Worse, there is nothing our technology can do on this rock that can stop it or mitigate it. As a species we either just survive it or we don't, it doesn't get any more complicated than that.

Space travel however is the one avenue that mitigates species disaster. A colony on Mars for instance is immune to the effects of a world-altering supereruption on Earth. Meaning if the eruption was bad enough and human life died off on Earth, we as a species still survive. Space travel grants us immortality through redundancy.

It would cause huge amounts of death and suffering, obviously. But as you say, it would be Class 1 (Societal Disruption), and definitely not Class 3 (Species Extinction).

And only a truly independent space colony would be immune to disruptions of this scale on Earth (even then, it would probably face a lot of economic difficulties, but let's forget about this for now.)

The sort of colony that we could set up right now would collapse very, very quickly after such an event; and frankly, it seems to me that at the moment we can improve of many of the technologies that we will eventually need at a lower cost by doing research on Earth. To start with space colonization right now would be to put the cart way, way before the horse.

We have the technology. What we lack is the will.

What we have is the technology to — barely, riskily, and at a huge cost — put a few people in a can, throw them on Mars, and perhaps allow them to eke a meager and uncomfortable living once they are there. For a while.

This is not what we need. We need a lot of advancements in ecosystem management, materials science, robotics, propulsion systems, and so on; and then we can send colonists on Mars. It would still be uncomfortable and risky living; but nowhere as much as what we could do now.

With existing technologies we could do a lot better than that. The problem is that, in the wake of the inevitable result of the shortsighted greed and stupidity that have been the predominant driving forces of the last few decades, everyone is busy penny-pinching and trying to stave off total economic collapse.

Can anyone enlighten me vis-á-vis He-3 mining? Is that a good enough incentive to at least go back to the Moon?

Short answer: no.

Middle-length answer: try getting power out of the fusion reactors first, then we may think.

Long answer: not really, but at least it can be sold as a reason to the public, who won't know better and so may buy it.

There is no conceivable resource extraction scheme that would make colonizing Mars economically viable anytime in the near future. It simply costs too much to go there, and bring anything back. If, however, probes found indications of life there, then I think we could come up with the finances to send a handful of humans, on a two-way exploration mission. Xeno-life is game-changer in terms of our understanding of biology, it would start another space race. But until there is stronger evidence, it will have to be probes and robot crawlers.

Frankly, I think mining a near-earth asteroid is a much more likely proposition for permanent colonies in space.

Discover lithium, silicon and gold on the planet and you'll make your money back on the first haul. Modern electronics are dependent on those three metals.

There are plenty of resource extraction schemes that make colonizing Mars worthwhile. There are even non-extraction schemes too.

We've known water is there for years. Our probes are insufficient to find the evidence of life on Mars past or present beyond that.

edited 11th Jul '12 3:11:21 PM by MajorTom

It is as economically viable as swords on a modern battlefield are militarily. Nerds rage and present N+1 justifications, but the truth is they just delude themselves.

In other words: primo - silicon has been discovered on Earth. It's called sand. Secundo - gold is heavy, and it won't fly back to Earth by itself. Tertio - I'm pretty sure lithium is hardly that rare. Four (I guess it's quattro or something) - you have to find them first, not to mention mining them out, or refining.

It ain't called a rare earth metal for nothing. It's why Soviet records showing extensive deposits of the stuff in Afghanistan made world news when those records were dug up. The metal is of such value it would turn a third world backwater into a booming mining region practically overnight.

Then continue to think. Geologically if you find silicon, gold and lithium in extensive depositing then there will be related minerals associated with them as well such as platinum, uranium, copper, iron (Mars has so much of the stuff the surface often turns locally magnetic. It ain't called the red planet because the primary oxide is aluminum.) or others.

Mineral-wise, Mars and space in general is a gold rush just waiting to happen. The costs of space travel would plummet exponentially within a short time a few years at most as the minerals are used to fuel and build more and more space travel in search of more and more raw materials. In a space gold rush, we'd basically expand out to the Moon, Mars, the Jovian satellites, asteroids and perhaps more in as little as 20 years possibly less.

edited 11th Jul '12 4:09:33 PM by MajorTom

That reminds me of that company that just started up that's focused on mining near-earth asteroids. :o

Wouldn't mars have less gold and other heavy elements than earth? What with it being farther from the sun and all?