Elon Musk: SpaceX Wants To Build a City on Mars

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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The idea of building a city on Mars may seem to be a farfetched concept, but so did starting a space program from scratch or building a brand new type of electric automobile, but Elon Musk has a way of accomplishing the impossible. Musk refers to the Red Planet as a serious fixer upper. :D

Earlier this year, he told Henry Blodget that his plan involves taking a large number of people and a lot of cargo to Mars. He then wants to work on terraforming the planet to make it more habitable, to make it more like earth over time.
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Always sounds great, but I don't understand how terraforming can work on a planet that has lost it's magnetic field.. Without one, the first burst of solar radiation would blast away all of your hard work and you'd be back to where you started; with no atmosphere.
 
A planet's atmosphere is kept in place by gravity, not a magnetic field. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that wouldn't prevent us from changing its composition. Radiation will definitely be a hindrance, but not an insurmountable one.
 
I can already see the environmentalist suing to keep Mars in it's natural state.

And if they ever do find life, any chance of terraforming will be gone.
 
Steps for World Domination:
- Build spacecraft
- Fly spacecraft to uninhabited planet
- Complete
 
One major obstacle is the onset of osteopenia due to the low gravity on Mars. It's only 38% of Earth's.
 
Talyrius said:
A planet's atmosphere is kept in place by gravity, not a magnetic field. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that wouldn't prevent us from changing its composition. Radiation will definitely be a hindrance, but not an insurmountable one.
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Read up on the benefits of having a magnetosphere before you make another uninformed comment.
 
Grahamkracka said:
Read up on the benefits of having a magnetosphere before you make another uninformed comment.
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+1. If i remember right it extends 44K miles from earth? If you could build the city underground or something, that would help some.
I cant see much in the way of people living there for quite a while, when technology is better.
 
If Elmo Munk is involved, Mars will be equipped with a charger plug and batteries that routinely catch on fire or the entire planet will somehow end up exploding during one of its test launches. Seriously, if I ever consider moving to another planet, it'll either be Canada or Budapest.
 
Could we cut out the ignorant, no value added comments. This is [H] we can do better!

I personally am a fan of plan "B"s. Perhaps if we get serious about Mars we could create our own magnetosphere :). We should be dumping more $ into fusion instead of wars...
 
This from the same man that envisioned the hyperloop...a train so cool and futuristic he couldn't take time or money out of his billions to bother making it.


Excuse me while I don't hold my breath
 
Dayaks said:
Could we cut out the ignorant, no value added comments. This is [H] we can do better!

I personally am a fan of plan "B"s. Perhaps if we get serious about Mars we could create our own magnetosphere :). We should be dumping more $ into fusion instead of wars...
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This is [H] and can do both at the same time! ;)
 
Dayaks said:
Could we cut out the ignorant, no value added comments. This is [H] we can do better!

I personally am a fan of plan "B"s. Perhaps if we get serious about Mars we could create our own magnetosphere :). We should be dumping more $ into fusion instead of wars...
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You clearly haven't read a thread involving police, politics, religion, Windows, Apple, or women in this forum.
 
Skripka said:
This from the same man that envisioned the hyperloop...a train so cool and futuristic he couldn't take time or money out of his billions to bother making it.
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Nothing wrong with having dreamers to balance out the cynics. :)

I don't see a Mars colony any time soon either, unless we discover some currently unknown exploitable resource on the planet.
 
Terraforming sounds all fun and cool, but how would we even begin to do that on such a large scale?
 
Parmenides said:
Terraforming sounds all fun and cool, but how would we even begin to do that on such a large scale?
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We do it on a massive scale to our own planet, but it's a slow process even at its fastest.

Terraforming won't fix Mars though. It's just microwaved too much, we would need a way to establish a magnetosphere to keep any new atmosphere we created from being blasted away by the sun. That involves crazy science fiction tech we don't have. We can't even shield a space ship, let alone a planet.

I'd bet that we'll circumvent interstellar travel limitations long before we can begin to shield an entire planet from radiation.
 
Talyrius said:
A planet's atmosphere is kept in place by gravity, not a magnetic field. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that wouldn't prevent us from changing its composition. Radiation will definitely be a hindrance, but not an insurmountable one.
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It's believed that without a magnetic field the solar wind can ionize light atmospheric gasses and effectively blow them away to space.

There is some debate about this. The solar wind is not as intense as it was when the sun was newly-formed and some measurements indicate that Venus and Mars are currently being stripped at the same rate as Earth on average, but the measurements we have aren't that great. It may be that most of the atmospheric erosion occurs during solar storm events.

talk2troy said:
OMG GLOBAL WARMING !!!!!!! on Mars?
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No.
 
Step 1. Build a space gun.

Shooting supplies into space would be a lot cheaper than using rockets. Any Mars mission is going to need a lot of supplies.
 
Zuul said:
Why the fuck is there a reasreon NOT to colonolizize
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Well for starters, colonizing will cost trillions of USD....which we don't even have, and even if we did there are plenty of more immediatly beneficial things we could put it towards right here. There's also the simple fact that for the money FAR more science can be done with unmanned probes.

There's also the matter that for the $$$$$$$$$$$$$ after we land people somewhere then what? By all appearances there's a whole lot of nothing worth the effort apart from epeen in our solar neighborhood.
 
Skripka said:
Well for starters, colonizing will cost trillions of USD....which we don't even have, and even if we did there are plenty of more immediatly beneficial things we could put it towards right here. There's also the simple fact that for the money FAR more science can be done with unmanned probes.

There's also the matter that for the $$$$$$$$$$$$$ after we land people somewhere then what? By all appearances there's a whole lot of nothing worth the effort apart from epeen in our solar neighborhood.
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Its only money!

What things are more immediate? This world is going downhill and we need another place to stay.(maybe even take care of it :eek: )
 
Hagrid said:
Its only money!

What things are more immediate? This world is going downhill and we need another place to stay.(maybe even take care of it :eek: )
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There's a great idea....the world we live on is going downhill by our own doing and failure to ...lets colonize somewhere else and fuck it up too!

Hey I know. How about we learn to not fuck up our environment so much.
 
Skripka said:
There's a great idea....the world we live on is going downhill by our own doing and failure to ...lets colonize somewhere else and fuck it up too!

Hey I know. How about we learn to not fuck up our environment so much.
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And all that sets aside the fac that any meaningful colonization effort will take...decades upon decades.
 
Skripka said:
Well for starters, colonizing will cost trillions of USD....which we don't even have, and even if we did there are plenty of more immediatly beneficial things we could put it towards right here. There's also the simple fact that for the money FAR more science can be done with unmanned probes.

There's also the matter that for the $$$$$$$$$$$$$ after we land people somewhere then what? By all appearances there's a whole lot of nothing worth the effort apart from epeen in our solar neighborhood.
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The military gets most of the budget anyways, which is then wasted on stupid shit. Give some to NASA IMO.
 
Talyrius said:
A planet's atmosphere is kept in place by gravity, not a magnetic field. Mars has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that wouldn't prevent us from changing its composition. Radiation will definitely be a hindrance, but not an insurmountable one.
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Partially true. But without the magnetic field the solar wind will strip it away over time. As is the case with Mars.
 
PornoSatan said:
The military gets most of the budget anyways, which is then wasted on stupid shit. Give some to NASA IMO.
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Yep. We spend more on "defense" in one year than we've spent on NASA. Ever. Give or take a bit.

So yeah, some shifted priorities could speed things up a bit. If we found barely legal hookers and blow on mars you know Congress would step and get things funded.
 
Skripka said:
Well for starters, colonizing will cost trillions of USD....which we don't even have, and even if we did there are plenty of more immediatly beneficial things we could put it towards right here. There's also the simple fact that for the money FAR more science can be done with unmanned probes.
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It's not a money issue. Money is just an abstraction. We spend more on summer movies than we spend on NASA. I don't think we're quite ready for Mars colonization efforts, but we are more than capable of exploratory missions. It's just a matter of bringing enough of our/the international GDP to bear on the problems involved.

There's also the matter that for the $$$$$$$$$$$$$ after we land people somewhere then what? By all appearances there's a whole lot of nothing worth the effort apart from epeen in our solar neighborhood.
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What's the point of life on Earth?

Personally, I'm more interested in the moon and asteroids than Mars at the moment. We need to learn how to deflect dangerous asteroids and asteroid mining has the potential to completely eliminate mineral resource scarcity and greatly reduce the cost of interplanetary spaceflight. Imagine if gold and rare-earth elements were as cheap as aluminum. Lunar outposts are possible today for a fraction of the cost of Mars missions.
 
Skripka said:
There's a great idea....the world we live on is going downhill by our own doing and failure to ...lets colonize somewhere else and fuck it up too!

Hey I know. How about we learn to not fuck up our environment so much.
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HAHA! We have a better chance of making a black hole in our living rooms or creating a tachyon particle!

Now back to reality. We could populate mars with people who pass a test. Stupid people need not apply. :p
 
DeathFromBelow said:
It's not a money issue. Money is just an abstraction. We spend more on summer movies than we spend on NASA. I don't think we're quite ready for Mars colonization efforts, but we are more than capable of exploratory missions. It's just a matter of bringing enough of our/the international GDP to bear on the problems involved.



What's the point of life on Earth?

Personally, I'm more interested in the moon and asteroids than Mars at the moment. We need to learn how to deflect dangerous asteroids and asteroid mining has the potential to completely eliminate mineral resource scarcity and greatly reduce the cost of interplanetary spaceflight. Imagine if gold and rare-earth elements were as cheap as aluminum. Lunar outposts are possible today for a fraction of the cost of Mars missions.
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Won't happen until we retire chemical rockets....which is nowhere in the presently visible future
 
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Skripka said:
Won't happen until we retire chemical rockets....which is nowhere in the presently visible future
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There is no realistic alternative to chemical rockets for getting off the earth in the near-future, though I'm hopeful for space planes based on SABRE engines. Chemical rockets are adequate for Moon/asteroid missions. The issue is that we're only spending about half a percent of tax revenue on space exploration. Make it 1-2% and you can have Moon bases, asteroid missions, Mars missions, and everything else NASA does.

You do need more efficient propulsion for Mars. NASA's Mars mission architectures generally involve some sort of NERVA engine for the Mars/Earth transfers. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility, we've done extensive ground testing with them. It's a shame that Nixon and congressional republicans killed nuclear engine research at the end of the Apollo program.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
There is no realistic alternative to chemical rockets for getting off the earth in the near-future, though I'm hopeful for space planes based on SABRE engines. Chemical rockets are adequate for Moon/asteroid missions. The issue is that we're only spending about half a percent of tax revenue on space exploration. Make it 1-2% and you can have Moon bases, asteroid missions, Mars missions, and everything else NASA does.

You do need more efficient propulsion for Mars. NASA's Mars mission architectures generally involve some sort of NERVA engine for the Mars/Earth transfers. I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility, we've done extensive ground testing with them. It's a shame that Nixon and congressional republicans killed nuclear engine research at the end of the Apollo program.
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Woohooo We get to the Moon or an asteroid. We collect a few rocks send them back...then what?

Then what is why the Apollo missions stopped.

For the billions upon billions these missions cost the ROI of actually getting there is jack shit. Because after the epeen of getting there is gone, there isn't a ton of motivation to keep spending fantastic sums of money on going back. There's a bunch of rock and some hydrogen and helium...but why spend egregious sums of money? Just putting a goddamn common shovel into low-earth orbit at present lift fees comes out to $10,000-$20,000 sans operator.
 
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