Elon Musk: SpaceX Wants To Build a City on Mars

wait, what? Terraforming? so the planet has breathable air? if Elon Musk changes his companies name to Weyland-Yutani, and the planets name from mars to LV146, I am sorry, I am not going, other wise it's "Game over man, Game over :D
 
ianken said:
Partially true. But without the magnetic field the solar wind will strip it away over time. As is the case with Mars.
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Earth is slowly losing atmosphere in the same way Mars is. If their loss of atmosphere was that disparate, we would expect Mars to have lost its atmosphere completely by now.
 
Lets see, building a colony of some sort that is self sustaining would be a good first step. Water is plentiful on Mars, and as a result oxygen, growing food might be a bit more difficult due to the reduced solar intensity but I'm sure there are plenty of low light crops, perhaps GM crops hold the future, of course you're still doing it in a giant greenhouse, and I mean absolutely GIANT since the amount of land per person required to grow food would be quite high. Might need to just spend the money on electricity and use LEDs to provide the extra light/density for food growth.

As for the terraforming aspect, there are quite a few issues. Anyone can say melt the poles, put more CO2 into the atmosphere to warm things up, increases the pressure, water can exist in a liquid state. But...
No magnetic field, that's pretty damn big, the magnetic field is what keeps the solar winds from eroding the atmosphere away like it currently is. Granted that's a long time to do so, but still it's something to consider unless you plan on bringing fossil fuels and constantly dumping the output.
Less mass, means less gravity so the atmosphere it does have will not be as dense, nor as thick, and this will cause a couple issues, first is the radiation from the Sun, our atmosphere's oxygen blocks all the harmful short wavelengths from UV to gamma rays that come from the Sun, with less density and less thickness there's a very real probably a significant amount of it could reach the ground making it uninhabitable for life (everything from bacteria to plants not even mentioning humans yet!). Second the smaller density & thickness means less of a thermal mass, less greenhouse gases, overall would be quite cold there unless you had near dangerous levels of CO2 still in the atmosphere, and if you did have high levels of CO2....
... where's the oxygen going to come from? First is the acidification of the oceans due to all the CO2, the CO2 is going to get sequestered away as a result, that took millions and millions of years on Earth, then millions more for an ocean full of algae to create enough oxygen to make the surface habitable (see radiation comment about).

So yeah, we can terraform it with a lot of yet to be discovered technology, as of today though, it's nothing but a pipe dream. Stick with putting a self sustainable colony there, then worry about terraforming ;)
 
oh, and you'll need to convince the greenies that nuclear power is the only option. Solar ain't gonig to cut it at about 45% of the intensity, and wind power ain't going to work with the reduced pressure (wind speed means fuckall if there's not density to that wind)
 
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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I didn't realize that 19% is "Most" Must be some of the new math they teach in the public schools....

We send more on Social Security - 24%, Medicare, and Medicaid and Chip programs - 22%
Welfare programs account for another 12%
 
With fusion power, small reactors, big reactors.. mars sure!
For anything like that you need lots and lots of energy.. for heat, for water, for oxygen production.. for smelting metals.. you certainly can keep sending people and equipment, eventually it can grow to production facilities of metal production (after water and atmosphere is solved)
You can send dry food for decades probably, until some form of self-sustaining city is created, and then self expanding.
I can be done, with energy technology we don't have.. Terra forming mars could probably happen, if the cities there create enough waste to form an atmosphere outside, and things like that, but for that mars would be covered with closed cities running on fusion probably for centuries.
 
nutzo said:
I didn't realize that 19% is "Most" Must be some of the new math they teach in the public schools....

We send more on Social Security - 24%, Medicare, and Medicaid and Chip programs - 22%
Welfare programs account for another 12%
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No, Military is the most.. nice trick people always do bundling mandatory spending with discretionary.
Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are mandatory programs, for which you are taxed separate by an act of congress.
Discretionary spending always goes the most to military, and usually the most than all other programs combined.

And yes, shocking.. social security does have a multi-trillion dollar surplus.. Reagan did that.. the issue is that the federal government borrowed against it, basically transferring the money to the discretionary spending budget via government bonds.
So yes, they stole your social security future so spend it in wars...
seriously, read on it.. its going to take you a while to find the truth.. but this is it.
 
nutzo said:
I didn't realize that 19% is "Most" Must be some of the new math they teach in the public schools....

We send more on Social Security - 24%, Medicare, and Medicaid and Chip programs - 22%
Welfare programs account for another 12%
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Well duh. Those items are larger because they're mandatory spending programs that essentially all workers pay into. Compare the size of the working population to the size of the military and you start to see how comparatively large that defense spending figure really is.

Not that I'm saying a large military budget is completely unnecessary, but it seems to me that you're putting ideology ahead of a rational analysis of where the money is going.
 
sfsuphysics said:
oh, and you'll need to convince the greenies that nuclear power is the only option. Solar ain't gonig to cut it at about 45% of the intensity, and wind power ain't going to work with the reduced pressure (wind speed means fuckall if there's not density to that wind)
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LOL...remember the hellfire that erupted when the greenies went ape over a few tiny RTGs on Cassini?
 
Skripka said:
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.
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We didn't go to the moon to do science or build bases. We went to the moon because Kennedy wanted to move the cold war from a military to a civilian arena. Once LBJ was out of office and the Russian moon program had clearly failed there was no impetus to keep going. Nixon cancelled the second run of Saturn V rockets right after the Apollo 11 moon landing.

There's a bunch of rock and some hydrogen and helium...but why spend egregious sums of money?
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What you're saying is akin to the anti-Jeffersonians arguing that buying the west and dispatching expeditions was a waste of money. They really believed it would take centuries, if not millennia, to colonize the west.

There's a lot more than than gas and rock out there. A small 1.6km diameter metallic asteroid may contain upwards of $20 trillion in iron ore and precious metals. We're already approaching shortages of elements like tungsten. Over the next 50-100 years it could very well become profitable to mine asteroids for cobalt, tungsten, and platinum alone. The delta-v necessary to reach a near-Earth asteroid and come back is generally less than getting to the lunar surface and back.

There's also the defensive aspect. Major asteroid collisions are inevitable. Extinction-level events may only happen every few million years, but collisions capable of vaporizing a city happen every century or so. I would much rather see global defense spending focus on peaceful asteroid redirection and resource extraction than pointing guns and missiles at each other.

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.
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You don't need fantastic sums of money to go there and back. Each Apollo mission was essentially completely disposable and cost about $1 billion in 2014 dollars. In 2011 the United States was spending $20 billion dollars a year on air conditioning for tents in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a high initial cost for development and sending up the necessary spacecraft, but once everything is off-Earth hauling asteroid material back to earth could be accomplished at little cost with a reusable spacecraft powered by hydrogen/oxygen extracted from the asteroid(s) or an ion drive.

The big hurdle is figuring out the mining process, presumably breaking off chunks of asteroid and preparing them for atmospheric entry, as well as extracting water on site to generate hydrogen and oxygen. This initial investment would be financed as part of NASA's missions to asteroids and Mars.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
We didn't go to the moon to do science or build bases. We went to the moon because Kennedy wanted to move the cold war from a military to a civilian arena. Once LBJ was out of office and the Russian moon program had clearly failed there was no impetus to keep going. Nixon cancelled the second run of Saturn V rockets right after the Apollo 11 moon landing.



What you're saying is akin to the anti-Jeffersonians arguing that buying the west and dispatching expeditions was a waste of money. They really believed it would take centuries, if not millennia, to colonize the west.

There's a lot more than than gas and rock out there. A small 1.6km diameter metallic asteroid may contain upwards of $20 trillion in iron ore and precious metals. We're already approaching shortages of elements like tungsten. Over the next 50-100 years it could very well become profitable to mine asteroids for cobalt, tungsten, and platinum alone. The delta-v necessary to reach a near-Earth asteroid and come back is generally less than getting to the lunar surface and back.

There's also the defensive aspect. Major asteroid collisions are inevitable. Extinction-level events may only happen every few million years, but collisions capable of vaporizing a city happen every century or so. I would much rather see global defense spending focus on peaceful asteroid redirection and resource extraction than pointing guns and missiles at each other.



You don't need fantastic sums of money to go there and back. Each Apollo mission was essentially completely disposable and cost about $1 billion in 2014 dollars. In 2011 the United States was spending $20 billion dollars a year on air conditioning for tents in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's a high initial cost for development and sending up the necessary spacecraft, but once everything is off-Earth hauling asteroid material back to earth could be accomplished at little cost with a reusable spacecraft powered by hydrogen/oxygen extracted from the asteroid(s) or an ion drive.

The big hurdle is figuring out the mining process, presumably breaking off chunks of asteroid and preparing them for atmospheric entry, as well as extracting water on site to generate hydrogen and oxygen. This initial investment would be financed as part of NASA's missions to asteroids and Mars.
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Paragraph 5 sentences 1 and 4 need to meet outback to try and sort out which you actually think is true, because one is necessarily false. "Once everything is off Earth" to do something like mining...you seem to forget will cost more than the entire combined GDP of every nation on Earth for a timespan of years if not decades at $5000+/KG lift costs like we have now.

A simple shovel weighs 2-3KG. That is $10-15,000USD to put into LEO

A mid-sized front end loader weighs 10,000KG or so....which amounts to $50,000,000 to put into LEO.


Also once you start bring stuff back, scarcity goes down and prices plummet. Review your history. Chris Columbus went over the ocean not to explore or find the New World but in search of Cheddar (gold)....he didn't care about blundering into the New World, he wanted resources (gold). Eventually by enslaving the locals he got his gold. But when he brought back the gold to Europe-it crashed the gold economy of Africa. Utterly crashed it. And so started the hugely profitable slave trade industry, which Chris Columbus unintentionally grandfathered just as much as he unintentionally discovered the New World.

Sure things are profitable now. But if you're right about resources, and if they can be brought back here....it will rapidly become unprofitable and tank due to simple market forces.
 
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