New Mars Forums

I think private sector will succeed in making the necessary hardware to go to Mars before anyone else. However, the private sector will not be the first ones on Mars themselves, because they simply cannot afford their own hardware. This is very similar to the colonization of North and South America - the companies that made ocean going sail ships did not travel across the ocean themselves. Many actually didn't even know, or care, that the ships they built were going to travel that far away from home. Being the first ones on Mars is then simply a question about who will be willing to spend lots of money on going there. I voted for China, but it could be another big country (like India) as well.

I don't think a maglev would sense from an economic point of view, and I will try to illustrate why by making up some numbers. Let's say building something like this would cost $100 billion. If the interest rate is 5% then that would be a fixed annual cost of $5000 million. If the variable cost per launch is 0, then the price per launch would be something like this:

1 launch per year - $5000 million per launch
10 launches per year - $500 million per launch
100 launches per year - $50 million per launch
1000 launches per year - $5 million per launch
10000 launches per year - $500 000 per launch

With traditional launches I guess it is the other way around, so that the fixed costs are low and the variable cost per launch is sky high. I made up all the numbers here, but the conclusion would be the same with real estimates: you need A LOT of launches per year to make a profit.

I like dense cities, and I think quality of life could be just as good in a Martian city-state as in any city on Earth. I don't believe that there would be any more individual freedom on Mars than in most democratic countries on Earth though. Quite the contrary, people will be much more dependent on the "civilization" then here, because of the dependency on expensive equipment no individual can afford on his/her own like power plants, water extraction equipment, space suit factories, nitrate extraction mines, huge domes etc. etc. The same applies to potential lunar colonies. I don't think any group of people on Mars will be able to isolate themselves, because they will depend 100% on trade and contact with others.

What really appeals to me about colonizing Mars is that it is a possibility for humanity to spread beyond our current habitat. It is like we suddenly discovered new uninhabited continents on Earth. I think it is natural for any organism to try to spread and conquer new places. Those who don't eventually go extinct.

The settlers on Mars will bring along both negative and positive aspects of their own culture, and the culture of a Martian state a few hundred years from now will simply be a mix of the cultures brought by the first settlers. Just like US American culture is simply a mix between Northern European and Latin culture. Mars will certainly not be a Utopia, and there might even be wars between different groups of settlers. It depends on who go there in the first place - it is an undeniable fact that some cultures are more peaceful than others.

I am, unlike a lot of Mars enthusiasts, skeptic about the idea of terraforming. I think it is better to spend resources on technology that makes it possible to thrive without radically changing our environment. Besides, we might discover other planets orbiting other stars that already have an atmosphere suitable for life in the open.

Colonization of Mars might change Earth more than we realize today. Maybe the whole planet 1000 years from now will turn into a kind of national park / museum in order to preserve it so that other terrestrial species are allowed space to continue to evolve.

Mars probably has some sort of nitrogen deposits, but we haven't really been looking for it yet I think. The composition of the human body gives a good idea of what elements that must be found on Mars, and what element that can be brought from elsewhere:

Nuclear energy can be cheap, clean and efficient. The technology is not really that complicated either - I could easily build a small reactor in my living room if someone provided me with the right kind of uranium. I am sure that Mars, like Earth, has many sources of suitable radioactive isotopes. Fusion energy has a great potential, but if it doesn't work then normal fission is a good and proven alternative. In the long term it may be possible to transport energy between different locations in our solar system in the form of anti-matter. This anti-matter could for instance be produced on Mercury.

The most efficient greenhouse gas is sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which is 22,200 times as efficient as CO2. If all we want to do is to heat Mars then this gas would be perfect, and it has a lifetime of 3200 years in Earths atmosphere. SF6 is a heavy gas, and it is not going to escape from Mars. The catch is that producing it requires a lot of energy, and even a slow terraforming would require a few power plants equivalent to the biggest ones we have on Earth. If I were living on Mars I would rather have used that power on heating my dome and growing food for my kids unless there is a huge power surplus that can be invested in long-term projects.

That is a great render! It is unfortunately not one of mine though.

I did not really find any at the ESA site. My main concern when making the vehicles in the render was to maximize the internal volume and minimize the surface area. I think that is what you have to do if you want to make a pressurized vehicle as light as possible. I also considered making a tractor-like unpressurized vehicle optimized to drag heavy stuff around on the surface. The water-tank in the picture is for farming krill - these wonderful small shrimp-like creatures that is the foundation of all life in the Arctic.

In 1000 years people might have found more earth-like places than Mars orbiting some of our closest stars, and they are going to spend lots of money (or rather machine time) on coming up with ways of getting there.

I have always imagined Mars in the far future to be an almost continuous city, and the low gravity makes it possible to build much taller structures than on Earth. I am not sure that terraforming will be a success though.

People are going to look just as they do now if we for some reason don't start genetically engineering ourselves. Evolution in rats and other fast reproducing mammals are much much faster, because they in 1000 earthling-years time could have gone through as much as 4,000 generations. The same amount of natural selection in humans would take at least 100,000 earthling-years.

I believe those who think of Mars of some kind of future Utopia will get very dissappointed. Mars will never be a paradise, and neither will any other human settlement. Just look at the world today - there are no such thing as a perfect society or culture - and there never will be.

It would be great if something valuable enough for exportation was discovered on Mars, because this would mean that the private sector would gladly put huge amounts of money on the table to develop the technologies necessary for colonization.

However, one aspect about mining and exploitation worries me, and that is how robots could easily make humans in space superfluous. Robots on our own moon can for instance be run directly by remote control from earth, and I don't really see any reason to have people there at all if you want is to extract minerals. Robots are getting better every year, and they will soon be capable of performing all the same tasks as humans.

I would therefore like to have a combination of both mining/exploitation and people wanting to go there for other reasons. The profit motive was an important incentive in the colonization of the Americas, and similar incentives would also work on Mars.

We do not need artificial gravity. The people within the space ship will already have been exposed to all the diseases present in their ship before their immune systems starts to deteriorate. The trip to Mars is not that long either, and human t-cells have a lifespan of 20 years.

It is a myth that difficult conditions make people go nuts. Most people can actually survive for instance a plane crash and be able to do their job efficiently the next day. Even survivors of holocaust are surprisingly sane. Besides, there are people who travel across the oceans on our own planet all by themselves, and I think that is much tougher than going to Mars. The only people who go nuts on a trip to Mars are those who are already nuts before they go.