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realistically speaking, what's the benefit of bringing a man to mars?


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realistically speaking, what's the benefit of bringing a man to mars?
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>>7926771
Faster research potential, inspirational moment, paving the way for future colonies. Realistically, it's not that big a deal which is why a colony for example is not happening anytime soon. We still have earth to fix and wholly inhabit before we move on to Mars.
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>>7926771
Beating other countries there first.
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>>7926774
>Realistically, it's not that big a deal which is why a colony for example is not happening anytime soon. We still have earth to fix and wholly inhabit before we move on to Mars.
That's why, personally, I think its a waste of money. We should just wait until technology advances so that a mars colony becomes possible
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>>7926781
>We should just wait until technology advances
technology doesn't advances when you "wait", you have to actively work towards going and colonising mars to advance the technologies
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>>7926781
Which is what is going to happen desu. A few more robots to find extraterrestrial life if it exists on Mars and nothing more for quite some time. At least that's what I think is going to happen. It remains to be seen.
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>>7926771
>what's the benefit of bringing a man to mars?
A whole low gravity planet to industrialize
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>>7926786
This is happening, like growing crops in martian-simulated soil which was done recently. I don't think he meant abandoning all efforts to colonise, but rather to not needlessly rush it.
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>>7926786
well, robot technology, for example, advances independant of nasa.
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>>7926771
You've got to understand just how feeble the Mars rovers have been so far. They spend most of their time traveling, and have a travel time measured in meters per HOUR.

Rovers are ineffectual on Mars for the same reasons they're ineffectual on Earth. Nobody would send a slow, clumsy, breakdown-prone remote control unit to do work in any but the most hazardous situation on Earth, and that's with negligible speed-of-light delay.

A manned mission could do years of a rover's work in hours.
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>>7926792
but there is no cheap way to bring those industrial goods to earth
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>>7926803
yeah but a manned mission is exponentiall more expensive than a unmanned one.
you could have hundrets of unmanned missions for the prize of a manned one
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>>7926810
First of all, there's no reason you have to send industrial goods back to Earth. You can simply use them on Mars, or you can use them in space, which you can reach more easily from Mars than from Earth.

Secondly, there's no reason it has to be expensive to send things from Mars to Earth. What does it cost? The use of a rocket and propellant. What do those cost? Materials, energy, and labor that could be replaced to an arbitrary degree by automation, which will ulitmately reduce it to material and energy costs.

Materials and energy can be had on Mars.

I like the analogy of travel on Earth. Let's say everyone lived in Hawaii. What would be the advantage of ever leaving it? There's nowhere that's nicer than Hawaii, and anything else is a long, difficult journey away.

Except, you know, it's a great big world, and Hawaii is only a very small part of it. Most of the land area and resources are not in Hawaii. If you stay in Hawaii, and other people move out, their descendants are going to have a whole world that yours won't.
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>>7926771
I don't see one, other than the feels of pushing boundaries, risking peoples lives, and getting a rush out of our own ingenuity as humans. There is no direct, intrinsic or measurable benefit to the lives of ordinary humans. The only benefit is inspiration. We may discover that life once existed outside of our planet, but it's certain that we brought life there anyway in the form of microbes on our rovers.

Mars will never be a good candidate for long-term human colonies. The only way humans could exist there with currently theorized technological possibilities is if they lived deep underground, and received constant and periodic care packages from earth. It would not be a happy life, and would probably drive anyone insane. It's a pipe dream, and any resources spend on it would probably be better spent here on earth. I'm all for progress, but not at any cost.
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>>7926810
>but there is no cheap way to bring those industrial goods to earth
So use them on mars then.
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>>7926839
>First of all, there's no reason you have to send industrial goods back to Earth.
So, what would motivate me, as an earth citizen, to kickstart a industry from which i wont profit?
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>>7926861
>So, what would motivate me, as an earth citizen, to kickstart a industry from which i wont profit?
Are you an idiot?

If I build smartphones in china, do I need to export them to Europe to earn money from them?
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>>7926864
there is a trade of goods between west and china.
there would be no trade of good between mars and earth
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>>7926897
There doesn't necessarily have to be for the two markets to benefit one another
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>>7926816
>a manned mission is exponentiall more expensive than a unmanned one.
This doesn't even make sense. You're comparing two single expenses, not talking about a growth rate. A relationship between two numbers can't be exponential.

>you could have hundrets of unmanned missions for the prize of a manned one
Bullshit. The Curiosity rover cost $2.5 billion. "Hundreds" of times that is at least half a trillion dollars.

Now, you might be tempted to point at something like the ISS program, which has cost in the neighborhood of $150 billion, or the Apollo Program, which cost about $170 billion in today's money.

What you have to realize about ISS is that spending money was the point. It was NASA's excuse to continue the shuttle program, and a way to keep Soviet rocket engineers and technicians employed so they wouldn't run off and work for dictators or China. Now, when NASA's manned-program competence has reached such a low ebb that it has found itself nothing else of its own to keep crew alive in space, it's being continued so NASA can credibly say it has a manned space program.

As for Apollo, they were inventing most of what they needed on a rush schedule, and working with 60s technology in a bureaucratic organizational structure. They built the world's first integrated-circuit computer for the guidance system! They were throwing money at anything that could help, and there was more than a little profiteering and bureaucratic empire-building going on.

$500+ billion Mars-program estimates are arrived at rather simply:
1) NASA, under its current management, couldn't put a man on Mars with any amount of money,
2) $500 billion dollars is about the smallest figure you can definitely say NASA won't be given for a project.

A minimal manned Mars landing can probably be done for $10 billion or less. By the next Mars launch window, SpaceX should be able to put a Crew Dragon on Mars, loaded with tons of supplies, for under $200 million: an improvised solution.
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>>7926914
so earth people send goods to mars and mars sends worthless money in return?
doesnt sound like a good deal to me
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continued from >>7926918
...but that's not SpaceX's Mars plan.

I'm sure they would love to launch a Crew Dragon to Mars, and a used Cargo Dragon to Mars orbit, in the next window, and that they'd do both for under $300 million, if someone would pay for it. That would give them useful experience and data.

But when you start talking about SpaceX, Mars, billions of dollars, and a 5+ year timeframe, you're talking about them developing their next generation, fully-reusable launch vehicle, which will blur the line between between upper stage, lander, and return vehicle. They're going to set up fuel production on Mars, and fly their stage/spacecraft/lander/returner back to Earth for reuse and for return of any samples or crew.

This is going to put manned missions into the same cost range as unmanned missions, because the supplies for manned missions are relatively cheap, while the hardware of unmanned missions is complex and expensive, so the difference in cost is mostly about the cost of transporting mass to and from the Mars surface.

A launch system which is not only fully reusable in Earth space, but fully reusable to and from Mars, with a large payload capacity and propellant production on Mars from native materials, can reduce the transportation cost to Mars and back by about four orders of magnitude: a factor of ten thousand. A hundred-expendable-launch mission architecture becomes a single-reusable-launch journey.

It stops making sense to build fiddly remote-control rovers, when you can just fly people there and back.
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>>7926771
So the poor fools can die from the solar radiation already and convince everyone else it's a retarded idea and to stop talking about.
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>>7926918
You're arguing with moon landing deniers about a manned mission to Mars, and you don't even know that they think 'exponential' means "a lot more".
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>>7926918
>This doesn't even make sense. You're comparing two single expenses, not talking about a growth rate
in an unmanned mission, you need to bring a robot to mars
in a manned mission, you need to bring a rocket to mars that has enough fuel to go back to earth.
the amount of necessary fuel grows exponentially with the amount of rocket stages
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>>7926774

>We still have earth to fix

I'm sick of hearing this bullshit. At what point will we think Earth is 'fixed' or whatever phrase you want to use? Earth is fucking massive and corruption is rampant. It will never be completely 'fixed'. It's been getting better for the past while, but it's just too big for all of the shithole places on it to stop being shitholes within any reasonable length of time.

Earth will continue to generally improve for many years, with ups and downs. Sitting on our hands for who knows how many hundreds of years until we pass some arbitrary threshold before we try to become an interplanetary species is an incredible waste of time.
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You need exponentially larger rockets to carry more weight into space, but what if you first launched a giant, more-or-less empty vessel into orbit, and then, with reusable rockets, ferried fuel and supplies into the vessel over multiple missions, until it's all loaded up and ready to go to Mars?

Thinking on it, though, it would probably make more sense to have the thing not even bother landing on Mars, and instead just carry landers or whatever on it. It can then just go back and forth between Earth and Mars as needed.
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>>7927095
We cant start interplanetary settlement at least until we sort out earths political problems. Otherwise you will end up with a Nuclear arms race in Mars
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>>7927110
>Otherwise you will end up with a Nuclear arms race in Mars
Why would this matter?

Look, you can't solve the problem that people have political disagreements. The only solution to that is no more people.

It's basically inevitable that, as technology advances and time passes, nuclear weapons will become standard for all sovereign entities. They're very destructive, but they're not perfect weapons of absolute destruction. You can prepare to survive and rebuild from nuclear attack, although it's obviously preferable to not get nuked.

In the long term, the societies that survive and prosper will be the ones that avoid conflict by moving apart from each other and toward untouched resources, which means moving into space.
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It could possibly expand our understanding of the universe.
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>>7927127
There is no reason for nuclear weapons to be standard. an arms race is the lose-lose square in prisoner's dilemma. Its not the ideal state for either side and it can be avoided with better communications.

>In the long term, the societies that survive and prosper will be the ones that avoid conflict by moving apart from each other and toward untouched resources, which means moving into space.
If you have war on earth, it will follow you to Mars, there is no reason to think other nations will just let you colonize mars as you wish.
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>>7927128
You stupid fascist, who cares about understanding the universe! We've gotta give more money to nigger welfare leeches and retarded people.
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>>7927137
>There is no reason for nuclear weapons to be standard.
There's no reason for sovereign entities to arm themselves with the most effective deterrents to foreign aggression?

>an arms race is the lose-lose square in prisoner's dilemma.
There is no "arms race", just arming yourself, and war is also the "lose-lose square", but it keeps happening.

The reason wars have been reduced since WW2 are:
1) the nuclear deterrent, but more importantly
2) advances in technology, particularly agriculture, which have allowed production of necessities and luxuries to both outrun population growth.

Even so, the world has hardly been peaceful, and it's getting increasingly crowded. The spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable as the advance of technology makes it cheaper, and their use is inevitable because peace never lasts forever, and in a serious war, people use their best weapons.

Believing in a permanently peaceful world is a utopian fantasy, like expecting communism to work. It's refusing to acknowledge human nature.
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>>7927137
>If you have war on earth, it will follow you to Mars, there is no reason to think other nations will just let you colonize mars as you wish.
Moving to Mars gains you some distance and eases the competitive pressure. If someone launches missiles at you from Earth, you have months rather than minutes to intercept them or prepare for the impact. Besides, you're probably already living dug in and in sealed habitats, making you far more resistant to attack.

More importantly, colonizing Mars is just getting a start on moving into space. It's the beginning, not the end, of the spread of man beyond Earth. Having established the ability to survive without the biosphere we evolved in, it's a much smaller step from there to dispersing through the solar system and even leaving it.
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>>7926774
>We still have earth to fix and wholly inhabit before we move on to Mars.
The fuck are you talking about? Earth is fine. Time to move on.
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>>7927110
Political problems? What problems? Those "problems" are part of being human and it's how we grow and evolve as a species.
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>>7927110
Mustering the will to colonize space is a major step in solving those problems. It requires a large number of humans to think about the long term well being of the species.
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>>7927137
>it can be avoided with better communications

>implying some cultures and governments aren't simply belligerent or don't hold radical beliefs that are mutually-exclusive to everyone else's

We hold peace talks all the time, but that means fuck all when people are brought up to hate you just because they're indoctrinated with a radical sense of nationalism from birth.

Exactly how is the Western world supposed to make peace with North Korea or territories of the Middle East that are under the control of extremist groups like ISIS?

These countries need to get their own shit together, and that's going to take years of corruption, civil war, collapse and more civil war before they begin to realize what they've been doing wrong all this time.
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>>7926771
No laws.

You can grow lolis in Martian soil.
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>>7927275
>Exactly how is the Western world supposed to make peace with North Korea
By not trying to economically enslave the world by bombing every country that tries to nationalize their natural resources.
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>>7927283
>By not trying to economically enslave the world by bombing every country that tries to nationalize their natural resources.

I never agreed with occupying the Middle East, but this is to say nothing of our relationship with North Korea, or NK's relationship with Japan.

Even if the U.S. so much as tries to provide relief to countries that are being invaded or exploited by corrupt parties, the rest of the world wants to spin it as Cold War politics.
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>>7927300
Why do you think the DPKR is so resistant against foreign influence? Do you think they are run by a bunch of mustache twirling villains and use mind control devices on their people? They don't want foreign influence taking advantage of them, and there is a lot of evidence for that happening, especially in Korea.
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>>7927345
>Do you think they are run by a bunch of mustache twirling villains
Basically, yes. Maybe at some point there was some sincere belief in communism, but now it's all about the people on top staying on top and enjoying the privileges of being on top.

Elite North Koreans can have servants and sex slaves, get smuggled foreign luxuries and get away with murder.

>and use mind control devices on their people?
They don't have them, so:
>Why do you think the DPKR is so resistant against foreign influence?

...and that's why they only let the people hear about the outside world through state propaganda. Starving people in North Korea are told that the rest of the world is worse, and they have no reliable way to learn otherwise.

I remember one story about someone who escaped from North Korea into China crying when he saw a dog being fed leftover rice.
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Are there any useful resources on Mars?
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Be better than the Russians
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>>7926771
Additional space for living. Great for continuing out into the solar system or beyond for whatever reason, probably materials gathering.
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>>7927366
I'm not saying the DPRK is good, but it is not right to ignore how their actions are reactions to a lot of negative shit in the world. Korea being stepped on by foreign powers defines Korean history and the DPRK was simply fed up with it.
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>>7927413
>it is not right to ignore how their actions are reactions to a lot of negative shit in the world
Every group of people has had negative shit done to them, and it's never an excuse. It's simply not necessary to consider their history to judge their present actions.

It's like, "Hey, here's this criminal. We caught him doing crime." "Well, you have to consider he was abused as a child, and the inequality in society." No you don't. Understanding how somebody became an asshole is not relevant to the question of whether they are an asshole, or how to deal with assholes.
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>>7927431
As I already said, it's not an excuse. I'm just protesting the apparent ignoring of why the DPKR is the way it is. It's not a bunch of mustache twirling villains brainwashing their people, at least not in a way any different than most other countries.
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>>7926774
>We still have earth to fix
The parts of Earth that needs fixing is filled with people who do not want a fix.
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>>7927451
This.

Humanity will never all be on the same page. If we waited for everyone to catch up we'd still be sitting around fires knapping away at flint.
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>>7926810
With a massive low gravity planet brimming with resources with no ecosystem to disrupt, economy of scale would probably win out
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>>7926774
>We still have earth to fix and wholly inhabit before we move on to Mars.

This is said way too much. Earth could fix itself while having a colony somewhere doing research. Earth would have to "fix" itself to get this happen, but to the extent where we could actually have a colony. Peace in the Middle East probably isn't necessary, but more funding and more studies would be for example.

It sounds really cruel but it really isn't. We can't selectively hold something back like colonization and declare that we should fix everything before we do that. Else, why not now, why not fix Earth before we decide to turn on the LHC?
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>>7927110
If a new nation were to be created on Earth, would you say that we had to fix all the political problems we have before we could deal with it? It'll be a slow, drawn out, and gradual process. It's not like Mars would take us by surprise and the colonists would send nukes to Earth.

In other words, these problems are tackled real-time. Just go full-out with that idea of yours and think it through. Imagine if that situation was real, and think about different aspects of it. You'll see the problem with saying we need to sort out all our political problems beforehand.
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I see this thread a lot and for some reason I always read it even though it makes me unhappy. Really I can't believe how bad sci is these days, it seems to have a lower quality of discussion than /b/ even.

In answer to OPs question. Yes, there are a million "realistic" reasons, but I don't want to talk about those. The fact is that no one has defined what is "useful" "good" "beneficial to the human race" or whatever the fuck you want to say. Is it giving food to the poor? Is it making a slightly faster computer?

The fact is that there's no objective way to judge the value of anything, a lot of people would look at something like the invention of a morefuel efficient car and say "yes, this is objectively good" but really they can't back it up because they can't prove that anything matters whatsoever, which it doesnt.

What I'm trying to say isn't that we shouldn't feed the poor and make more fuel efficient cars, what I'm saying is that at some point you just have to say "this is good.... because I feel like it's good". And that's exactly why space exploration and colonization is important. Venturing into the unknown, expanding our horizons, is something that is built into humans, as Carl Sagan said very eloquently in the opening to "pale blue dot". I suppose that for a fair amount of people on this board, that desire had been repressed to the point of death.

>b-but my money! I'm dropping so many billions of dollars right out of my pocket to go to Mars and I don't even get anything out of it!

Mars is a drop in the fucking bucket, do you know how much the god damn F-35 costs? As for where the money goes, it goes to the economy on earth, the actual resources lost in space are tiny compared to the amount of economic growth generated by a proper space program. I'm not going to even touch on the scientific benefits and the whole "not getting wiped out if earth gets destroyed".

>>7927110
This guy is fucking stupid
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"Bringing"
Welcome to 4chan Martian overlord. You can mate our human with your kind and derive hybrids that may be of use !
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>>7928360
Exploring and wonder is a part of humanity. Venturing out of Earth is the current evolved form of sticking a flag on an island and categorizing the rocks. The Earth might as well be a giant house with it's enormous family that refuses to find an apartment somewhere else. Besides that, it really should be a no-brainer. This is our only planet in a universe full of planets. This reason alone should be enough to consider colonization as a good idea.

Colonization is going to happen within the next 100 years, and however simple it is it's still going to be a pretty good start. If we don't do it today, we'll do it in hundreds of years from now. Either way, we're doing it, so we might as well get a start on it to work out all the kinks. There will come a point where there is a point of no return, where you can't just call a space agency to send it's people back, and where there is a permanent residency on another body in the solar system. That is what we need.

Political problems shouldn't be about economics and "solving everything before we work on this". The problems would actually lie in the rights of people both on Mars and on Earth. After all, we certainly can't expect a space agency to selectively handle who goes to what planet for all of eternity. I'm not saying we will allow any Dick and Terry to ride a rocket to Mars, but certainly there will be some kind of political storm brewing when more people want to live on Mars besides just scientists.
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>>7927095
the biggest part of the joke is that they think some small amount more social spending will ever "fix" anything

Especially since the people who say it are marxists that deny race & genetics
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>>7927431
well its just human nature to overreact to danger. /sci/ does it all the time, blacks do most crime, even though its still a minority of blacks /sci/ overgeneralizes and goes full nazi. This is what DPRK, Zimbabwe and Iran does. The west fucked them over in the past so now they have become fully irrational and paranoid
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>>7926771
Learning how we can bring even more men to mars.
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Why do people in this thread think that the best solution to colonisation would be underground habitats? Wouldn't that make it way more difficult to get energy etc from the surface and do stuff like farm crops? Wouldn't it be more cost-efficient in the long run to build above-ground settlements with radiation shielding?
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The most efficient thing would be starting with ruthless terraforming of a kind that wouldn't allow people to live on the planet for a pretty long while.

You would bombard the planet with ammonia rich asteroids to start a greenhouse effect and explode a bunch of fusion bombs on the poles to release CO2.

After everything has settled down, then you would return and build an artificial magnetosphere to protect the atmosphere.
http://www.nifs.ac.jp/report/NIFS-886.pdf

You would need to import a buffer gas like Nitrogen in large quantities to reach >300 mbar of it in the atmosphere.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~humbio01/s_papers/2001/budzik.pdf

Then you can start transforming the CO2 in the atmosphere to Oxygen with the help of plants and bacteria.
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>>7929423
>http://www.nifs.ac.jp/report/NIFS-886.pdf
wouldnt you want to do this before trying to give it an atmosphere? also where would the energy for this come from?
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>>7927063
Not even close...

This is the fucking science board, and you can't even take the time to play Kerbal Space Program? You realize "science" doesn't mean "really smart guesses", right?
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>>7929450
The loss of atmosphere isn't that bad, you can for wait a while. You just don't want to replenish it all the time. You want to establish protection preferably before producing Oxygen.

Hydrogen, Oxygen and Helium are usually the gases that are affected the most by atmosphere loss by solar radiation.

>also where would the energy for this come from?
According to the paper 1GW of power would be enough to power the longest cable of the 12 cables on a version of this on Earth. I would assume you would need even less on Mars.

For reference, the largest nuclear power plant on Earth produces 8 GW and we can assume that we will have probably figured out how to do Fusion properly at that point.
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Would be smarter putting people on the moon first.
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>>7927095
>expecting all problems plaguing humanity will magically go away if Mars is colonized
>expecting the government on Mars to not be equally corrupt

You popsci faggots really are fucking hilariously retarded
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>>7929494
huh, thats pretty cool. What sort of time frame is this predicted to happen in?
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>>7926897
>there would be no trade of good between mars and earth
1987: "No one will ever make money off the internet!"
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>>7929527
>What sort of time frame is this predicted to happen in?
For what exactly? The production of Oxygen, the building of the Magnetosphere? Not sure what you want a time frame on.
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>>7926771
Survival of mankind.

If a large scale disaster happens on earth the people on mars are still okay.

Not all eggs in one basket and such
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>>7929553
the timeframe before people could feasibly go and live there assuming that everything was to happen as you described
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>>7929572
>If a large scale disaster happens on earth the people on mars are still okay.

While it's true that this is ultimately an important goal, you should remember that requires a truly self-sufficient colony, and realistically that is thousands of years in the future. So it's not really an answer for why we should be sending people to Mars as soon as we can.
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>>7929614
>So it's not really an answer for why we should be sending people to Mars as soon as we can.
Well that's step 1 of the process.
You don't start a colony before sending a man over. I guess you could, but I think temporary manned missions as tests are beneficial to eventual colonization.
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>>7929608
Hard to say, hundreds of years probably.

Depending on the advancement of human space flight in the next 50 years, so we can even start. We didn't even have humans on Mars yet, let alone visit and mine the asteroid belt. We would need a way to get a lot of material into space, let's hope they can build a space elevator soon.
You would also need a way to get a steady acceleration to hurl the asteroids into Mars' gravity well, like solar sails or ion drives. They don't have to go fast, just steady.


The asteroid bombardment would take as long as it takes us to move all of the rocks. In the end that's just a matter of the amount of money and manpower people are willing to invest into this.

Raising the global temperature on Mars by 4°C would start a runaway greenhouse effect.
With the assumptions in the first paper that I've linked above, that greenhouse effect would stabilize at a global temperature pretty close to the melting point of water, which is the minimum goal for supporting plant based life. We would have to introduce enough ammonia or methane to get over that melting point.
I didn't find any number on the time that this runaway greenhouse effect would take to reach it's maximum.

We are lacking research on bacteria that can transform CO2 to Oxygen efficiently in a large scale in a harsh environment. I don't think there is any concrete number on how fast this would go.

On the other hand, once you have established a temperatures and pressure on the surface, you could walk around without pressure suits. You would just need Oxygen masks. That would make colonization at this early stage of terraforming already somewhat attractive. You could start building infrastructure.
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claim mars as legal property of the US so that russia can't make the red planet red
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>>7926771
Interplanetary memes.
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>>7926861
The answer is the chance to live on another planet, and to secure a path for you or your offspring to make serious profits off Mars industry, as well as giving your progeny a head start into deep space.

Evolution rewards risk takers.
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>>7929762
>terraforming
>destroying nature
Live in a dome and be done with it. You wouldn't terraform the Grand Canyon....
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>>7929795
Imagine the Grand Canyon covered in lush green forests, though. It would be very beautiful, and a wonder of the world if we did it.
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>>7929795
Are you seriously trying to say that we shouldn't terraform Mars because you think the rock formations are pretty?
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>>7929795
>You wouldn't terraform the Grand Canyon....

I certainly would. A totally green Earth would be amazing.
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>>7926816
Depends on if you care if they get back or not.
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>>7929450
>>7929494
A magnetic field only partially protects the atmosphere anyway. It's not a concern except over millions of years.

One of the main reasons Earth has more of an atmosphere than Mars is persistent volcanic outgassing on Earth. Another is Mars's low gravity, and hence much lower escape velocity. A third is Mars's low temperature, which freezes water and CO2 in the ground even at low pressure.

The first two cause the third: when the atmosphere gets thin enough that it has little greenhouse effect or heat capacity, it gets thinner as more of it freezes out.
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>>7929806
Basically, yes.
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>>7929977
Maybe we can keep a little reservation of useless frozen red rocks on the planet, just for you.
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>>7929936
would it be possible to keep mars' atmosphere warm enough through the greenhouse effect that the freezing issue wouldn't be a problem anymore?
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>>7929499
not really, delta V budget is approximately equal and in general the moon is a far less lucrative target for self sustainability
>>7929508
this isn't at all what he was saying, don't act like you know what you're talking about, and calling people "pop-sci" is a shitty fallback insult to cover up a lack of a real argument
>>7929614
> thousands of years in the future
wrong, mars could be fully breathable / farmable within 1000 years and self sustaining withing 150, we have the technology to start colonization and we have the resources so we should go asap
>>7929977
well at least you're honest
>>7929762
According to a book I read on terraforming, the timeframe looks something like (using a statite mirror over the south pole to melt the CO2), 90 years to liquid water and safe pressure, 1000 years to breathable atmosphere, but it certainly depends on how well we can genetically engineer plants to do the conversion
>>7929423
I really appreciate this link, I've been looking for a decent paper on an artificial magnetosphere for a while
>>
>>7930009
hopefully. At least some of it should be preserved
>>
>>7930046
>According to a book I read on terraforming, the timeframe looks something like (using a statite mirror over the south pole to melt the CO2), 90 years to liquid water and safe pressure, 1000 years to breathable atmosphere

Can you give me the name of the book you are reading?
>>
>>7930057
>Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds
If I remember correctly it's not technical to the point of a research paper but it presents numbers and various simulations to back up the basic claims
I found it in my school's library back during my freshman year when I had time to read for pleasure
The 90 year, 1000 year is also what zubrin claims in case for mars, but I think that it could vary depending on concentration of CO2 in regolith
>>
>>7926771
We can dream about further shitting up Earth carelessly and one day just fucking off to another place. It's like when you are in a 20 hour carride with a bomb rigged to the door mechanisms that will only be disabled if the criteria that 20 hours have passed and you reached your goal are both met, and you have to shit really badly. You could try to hold it in, or shit a bag and knot it tight so that the smell stays in, but instead you think "well just 20 hours and I don't have to see the car every again" so you pull down your pants and start shitting so hard that the entire interior is covered with shit and one stream of shit hits the door handle so hard that it opens and triggers the bomb and you die before you even reached your goal.
>>
>>7930099
Nice analogy, they should print that on next greenpeace posters.
>>
survival of the species.

If a cataclysmic event happens to earth, then it would be good to have a second home.
>>
>>7926771
None.
The benefit is in figuring out how to do it in such a way that you can send the next guy much cheaper, cheap enough that the next guy can raise enough money to go himself without having to start his own space program.

There is no benefit to sending a human anywhere *once* that couldn't be gained with robots.
>>
>>7930046
>>7929499
>delta V budget is approximately equal and in general the moon is a far less lucrative target for self sustainability
Delta-V isn't everything. It really is fucking stupid to skip the moon and just go out to Mars.

- launch windows to Mars: about once every two years
- launch windows to the moon: just go whenever you want

- launch windows to return from Mars: about once every two years
- launch windows to return from the moon: just come back whenever you want

- travel time to Mars: about half a year
- travel time to the moon: a couple of days

- you arrive at Mars and realize you need something from Earth: emergency resupply in about two years
- you arrive on the moon and realize you need: emergency resupply whenever they get the rocket ready

- something goes wrong on Mars and you can't fix it yourself: you die
- something goes wrong on the moon and you can't fix it yourself: get a quick resupply or go home right away

- sending industrial quantities of useful stuff from Mars to Earth, LEO, or L2: nope
- sending industrial quantities of useful stuff from the moon to Earth, LEO, or L2: yup
>>
>what's the benefit of bringing a man to mars?

Learning how much of a waste of money it'd be.
>>
>>7930648
>If a cataclysmic event happens to earth, then it would be good to have a second home.

*when a cataclysmic event happens
>>
>>7926771
There is no "realisticly speaking". It's an investment for the future.
The thing which YOU get out of it is a leap in technological development.

>>7926781
It is a "waste" of money.
People take technological development for granted. In the civil world "it just happens".
But it happens because somebody's buying it; there's a supply, competetion and demand. A flight to mars costs $500,000,000,000. That's roughly the same amount of money spent in iraq between the years 2003-2005(502 billion). To really emphasise my point here, let me state that Bill Gate's wealth is around $77,000,000,000(77 billion). And the thing about rich people is that they don't spend money - they invest money. But a space flight to mars in the year 2016 isn't an investment as you will never profit from the flight.

So you see, there's never going to be an ideal time and nobody can ever afford this. But if we want to get there then we've got to "waste" money.
>>
>>7926781
>we shouldn't fund it until the tech is better
>the tech needs more funding to become better
>we shouldn't fund it until the tech is better

FUCKING RETARD
>>
>>7930822
>there's never going to be an ideal time and nobody can ever afford this. But if we want to get there then we've got to "waste" money.
That's bullshit, though. It doesn't have to stay expensive to launch stuff into space.

>>7930838
Very few useful things start from some insanely expensive, obviously unprofitable government pilot project. When the government throws money at things, they attract specialists in sucking up as much government money as possible, who are good at making it sound like they're making progress, but actually block all real progress.

If you want to see how the "We have to throw government money at this!" plan works, look at the space shuttle: a reusable launch vehicle to reduce launch costs. It was obvious that it was not going to reduce launch costs ten years before it flew, and then, when it didn't reduce launch costs, they continued using it, with only the most minor of improvements, for four decades. Fucking thing cost at least a billion dollars more every time they used it than it would have cost to do the same thing without it. Furthermore, the assholes in charge of it used their huge budgets and influence to discourage the development of any competing system.

This is the fucking wolf saying, "Hey, man, those sheep don't look safe at all. I bet you could use a big dog like me to guard them for you."

Funding NASA $500 billion to go to Mars would be the most certain guarantee that nobody's fucking going to Mars.
>>
>>7926771
A 7 inch increase in the size of our space dicks
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