[fuscy]

I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

Even if a meteorite hits Earth or Yellowstone erupts, Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because Earth has a lot of resources that are right under our noses: breathable atmosphere, radiation shielding, easily mined metals and organic matter.

It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars.

Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.

[alex_duf]

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

Personally I see quite a few positive things behind colonising Mars.

I think it's not about having a "backup", it's not about resources (or in a really long time) it's about the challenge.

If we can put our best engineers to solve how we re-use and recycle water, how we grow crops in extreme condition, how to control the O2 CO2 cycle (at a larger scale than on the space station), how to engineer a space craft that survive such harsh conditions we will end up with:

- technology to help our crops on earth

- technology to help with our water crisis

- technology to build sturdier structures

- international collaboration, that usually keep engineers from working on mass weaponry (The USA/Russian space program is actually motivated by exactly that: keeping the rocket scientists busy instead of working on ICBMs)

Mars just happen to be a goal silly enough that we'll get interesting discoveries and advances that I can't even foresee.

Another way to keep engineers busy and force international collaboration is to have a common threat. For that I believe the asteroid threat is both a real enough threat and a good subject to work collaboratively.

[da_chicken]

It's kind of like learning how to program when you don't have any task to complete. Especially for a data store of some kind. If you've ever tried to learn SQL, even if you've got an example database, you'll find it's incredibly difficult not because the syntax is all that difficult or the logic is particularly daunting. No, you'll find it's difficult because you don't have any questions to answer. You'll feel, "Okay, now what?" When you try to make up a question to answer, it's difficult to tell if you're answering the question correctly. You need the focus that a real problem gives you. You need the guidance that understanding what the data means gives you (or someone else) to know if your answer is right or wrong.

It's easy to see what a tool is designed to do. It's very difficult to see what a tool can be used for and why you might want to use it that way, let alone when you might want to deviate from that or find alternatives due to limitations or new requirements. Or when you might need entirely different tools.

We learn best when we're working on a problem. Just like going to the moon required solving a lot of problems which led to major advancements in the 20th century, going to Mars, colonizing Mars, and colonizing the moon have even more challenges.

Goals give research and development a clear purpose beyond, "I dunno, make something people want that we can sell."

[squish78]

I'm saving this answer. Love it.

[mr_overalls]

Not to mention that Mars gives humanity an opportunity to improve skills essential to expanding to other solar systems.

Besides the obvious - large-scale terraforming - a "practice" settlement of Mars gives us an opportunity to innovate and refine practically every engineering skill, form of social organization, or general skillful endeavor in humanity's repertoire.

Metallurgy, genetics, geology, farming, medicine, psychology - all of these fields are bound to discover new phenomenon and methodologies under the constraints and conditions of an alien planet.

Not to be glib, but necessity is mother of invention. And there is no necessity as powerful as the drive for survival.

[WorldMaker]

There's an old sci-fi idea, that if I recall Carl Sagan agreed with, that we should be working to colonize Venus now (which I believe "now" meant the 1970s at the time), because worst case if the greenhouse effect spirals out of control unstoppably (as climate change predictions have feared since the 1970s), surviving on Earth is going to be the same problem as colonizing Venus.

[Faark]

Others already mentioned benefits for us currently living humans.

Long term it is also interesting from an evolutionary aspect. Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum.

Gravity well's are an isolating factor. Living on mars will require a highly isolated economy producing essential goods. Once that prove of concept exist can it be reproduced everywhere else in the solar system (or beyond).

Those communities would not be subject to many of the tragedy of the commons situations we have here on earth with our shared ecosystem. No climate change. No plastic in water. No gene manipulation. Hell, you can even build a space station for only white people, if you are into that. Down the line, we'll see what works best.

Earth being that highly interconnected / -depended makes it more peaceful than ever, so war might become a problem again. Communication is still somewhat easy, so working together will likely still be beneficial.

[hyperbovine]

> Humans communities on earth are less and less isolated from each other, making it near impossible to evolve in different directions. That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum.

That is not how evolution works. You want more mixing to increase fitness, not less. Small, isolated populations are notorious for harboring deleterious genetic variants that decrease overall fitness.

[nkozyra]

> That increases the risk of getting stuck in a bad local optimum.

This is an important concern, but I don't think it really improves on a space colony. To make it habitable the pool would be limited by size - and worse - by heavily controlled environment.

[netcan]

I don't think you can really "justify" extraterrestrial colonization on critical, legible, practical grounds. There is no roi.

The real, immediate reasons are inspiration related. Some of that gets very practical, though it's always at least speculative. Technological spillover, for example, can be justification in itself. Earthen solidarity is maybe another, and I do actually think that the existence of a few of us elsewhere helps form the concept of "us." Both of these are "on mission" in the sense that they might be key to human survival.

Anyway... Mars colonization is a horizon goal. It's something to focus our minds. Practical activities are dictated by minor goals (eg visit Mars, generate energy locally, etc). A self sustainable mars colony that can survive earths vogon destruction is so far ahead that it's more of a symbol than anything.

We didn't have true practical reasons for going to the moon, or for the ISS either. The main reason is (imo) that space faring is a human mission, for its own sake.

No matter what though, I dont think space faring is something you could sell to your conservative money manager. It's imagination dependant (and inspiring)... a job for da Vinci, not Medici.

[lmm]

I can't see any path to colonising the galaxy that doesn't start with colonising the solar system. It's always going to be a long term project, there are always going to be things on earth that look like more immediate priorities, but I want humanity to spread among the stars, and if we don't start now then when?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with. When it comes time to think about colonizing other star systems, it's going to take a really, really long time to get to them and we'll have little idea what their worlds are like. Seems to me it'd be better to work on colonizing space itself, because you'll pretty much have to anyways to make interstellar travel viable, and once you've done it there really isn't a good reason to live on a planet instead unless it happens to be a lot like earth.

[anywherenotes]

Isn't a planet just a big spaceship with things built in? You can dig inside it for things, you don't need to capture asteroids, planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere, and Earth is already traveling at huge speeds, which are at very least on the level with the fastest spaceships we can currently make. Sure guiding a planet maybe harder than a spaceship made specifically for that purpose, but all the benefits of having resources right underneath, and planets are a proven space ships, with billions of years of testing, no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> planets can travel through space and have a protective shield - the atmosphere

Most worlds in our system don't have a significant atmosphere, most of those that do have too much of it. Like gravity, atmosphere also poses a problem for getting back to space.

> no man-made spaceship can match that for billions of years.

Not unmaintained, no, but if it was unmaintained that probably means everyone who lives there is dead anyway.

[lmm]

> Personally I think colonizing planets is a waste of time. There's plenty of minerals and water in asteroids and other space junk, and they don't have large gravity wells to deal with.

I more-or-less agree with this much, but the most suitable place to start learning to colonize space rocks is probably Phobos.

[fuscy]

Humans are terribly designed for space exploration: die quickly, require sustenance, can't handle high G forces, can't handle radiation.

I always believed that if humanity is to colonize something, it would be through robots that do all the exploring and mining for us.

[wklauss]

Humans were terribly designed to cross the Atlantic by swimming as well, but we designed boats so eventually we did.

Yes, robots are a cheaper and more reliable way to explore and extract resources but I doubt mankind will be happy with just that. We like to explore, and expand, and face challenges so I'd bet that no matter the setbacks or price tag, we will eventually prefer to do this things in person.

As an alternative: we could even redesign ourselves for space exploration if needed be.

[Retric]

Humans can physically swim from Eurasia to the Americas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Cox

As to your wider point, the ability to breath oxygen and have long term fat stores makes an Atlantic crossing very easy. We moved from one palace with humans to another place with humans, hardly a massive feat of engendering. Meanwhile people in far more primitive craft ended up living in Hawaii (2,200+ miles from the nearest land mass) of all palaces.

[wongarsu]

Astronauts have traveled further on the moon on the three missions that included the Lunar Roving Vehicle than all our mars rovers managed combined.

If you give a mars rover a command, it takes an average of 12 minutes for that command to reach mars, and another 12 minutes for the confirmation to come back. That makes remote control very hard, and we aren't all that good with autonomous robots.

So until we figure that whole artificial intelligence thing out humans are a much better bet for getting significant amounts of science and mining done than robots.

[mcbits]

The rovers we've sent to Mars weren't designed to travel great distances. Autonomous rovers built for maximum travel distance would be pretty easy except for supplying them with enough energy and protecting their delicate parts from the elements. Both problems are harder for humans, even on a one-way mission.

[raducu]

What's wrong with low G tolerance for interstellar travel? If speed of light is ~310^8, 1G ~ 10m/s^2, you would need (ignoring reletivistic effects) 310^7 seconds to reach the speed of light. There are 86400 seconds in a day, so you would need ~347 days to reach the speed of light if you were accelerating at 1G, were it not for relativistic effects.

[ianai]

Except relativistic effects are at play and iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech.

[lmm]

> iirc we don’t have “permanent” acceleration tech

Which is exactly why low G-tolerance doesn't matter. You have a limited amount of delta-V, whether you apply it all in one go or spread out over a year makes little difference given the timescales that are already involved in interstellar travel.

[konceptz]

Humans may also be the best at handling what you stated. You’re comparing us to robots but if you say humans were designed then our collective knowledge limits us to 1 at present. So we’re the best and worst.

[TrevorJ]

Humans build tools though.

[ianai]

more and more it sounds like the raw materials we need are available in the places we’d like to colonize - except energy. I’m starting to wonder whether once we have moved past fossil fuels if colonization beyond earth becomes dramatically easier.

[WhompingWindows]

You're assuming colonization is needed, when in reality we are just another species and are nothing to the universe on the cosmic scale. And yet, relative to the pointless wars and countless trillions spent primate-posturing, putting humans on a second floating rock is just as, if not more, sensible.

For me, it's something inspiring, a grand adventure, and may allow us to confirm the presence of life outside of our own globe. That alone would pay the cost of tickets, since shattering the illusion that our globe is the only one endowed with life by a creator, that is an outcome devoutly to be wished by rational beings.

[stallmanite]

What about an impact like what formed the moon? If the entire crust liquifies, I have a hard time believing it would be easier to survive on lava-earth than Mars.

[feefie]

You might enjoy this 4 minute video of Dr. Robert Zubrin giving three reasons why we should go to Mars.

I find it very inspirational/motivational to re-energize my focus on my own work, even though I'm not working on anything Mars related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plTRdGF-ycs

[skriticos2]

I concur. It's an interesting endeavour though - which mashes well with humanities impulse to progress and push the boundaries. Not everybody cares about that, but there are enough dreamers that marvel about humanity becoming an space faring civilization. The demand for science fiction is proof of that.

However, I personally don't understand why everyone wants to land on a dirtball that has a fraction of earths gravity. It will be crippling for the human physiology and pretty much precludes travel back to earth after a few generations of adaption.

I'd much prefer to build rotating orbital space stations that provide 1G centrifugal force. Easier on the body, better view out the window and no need to enter/escape gravity wells all the time. The dirtballs can be colonized by robots that don't care about gravity that much and can harvest resources for the stations.

Not that I have a say about this at all.

[ainiriand]

It is a very good point but consider Mars as a stepping point with very different conditions from the ones you can find on the desert. Gravity for example. Isolation, communication difficulties, technological difficulties that we need to overcome if we are to colonize other parts of the solar system.

[yitchelle]

I am surprised that as travel to Mars is becoming more of a reality, there are not a lot more folks trying to reach Mars for commercial gain.

I am correlating this back to when the Europeans are going around the globe and colonising every land mass they can land on. Why are should Mars be any different?

[majewsky]

Bringing a ton of gold to Europe from South America is waaaaaay cheaper than bringing a ton of anything to Europe from Mars.

[HeadsUpHigh]

As Elon Musk said you could have crates of cocaine on the surface of Mars ready to be transported back to Earth and it would still make more sense to buy it locally. It's just too expensive right now. Future spacecraft might change that but as with everything else this will come with scale and this scale right now doesn't have enough customers to justify itself.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

>Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.

Today, yes. But the first step to terraforming a dead planet is to colonize a dead planet. If we take the first steps and commit to our colony there, maybe someday we can have a second Earth.

[skzo]

Indeed, but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

[dagw]

but you are forgetting that Earth also has the biggest threat of them all... Humans

So will any place we colonize.

[robotomir]

Well in the absence of government regulations you could populate the new place with clones of yourself and institute a personal theocracy.

[henriquemaia]

A Little Prince fantasy?

[clomond]

I don't think there is contention in saying that it is a better place to live than earth in any circumstance.

Rather, I think it is the power of the process of a global collaboration in what would be the most exciting adventure for humanity in a generation. Us embarking on such an adventure would lead (I think the majority) of people to consider the importance of a "global" perspective and would probably be good for people to treat others better and make countries less likely to kill each other over seemingly "trivial" matters.

[wonderwonder]

If we colonize mars, and reach the point where we have a full fledged society there it can act as a means of quickly recovering from a catastrophe on earth. The benefit of a fully functioning city/nation sending resources to assist a ravaged earth would boost earths recovery time if the worst were to happen.

Secondly, it acts as a separate bed of innovation. On earth we solve for earth problems, on mars they would solve for different problems, potentially leading to scientific and tech breakthroughs we would otherwise overlook.

[Symmetry]

On the time frames we ought to be planning on I see Mars as a scientific research base and waystation on journeys further out. In the long run population growth is going to start back up again as the genes people who desire kids in the modern world prosper so it'd be nice as a source of living space, though really O'Neil cylinders are the real solution there.

[utopcell]

Much like the space program [1], colonizing Mars will be a focal point for developing technologies for improving life on Earth.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

[known]

http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/space.html has interesting details about Earth e.g. Earth day was only 6 hours long 4.5 Billion years ago

[ichik]

The same reason you do hello world before proceeding to more complex software engineering.

[bproven]

Sort of agree - BUT I would think that colonizing the moon would be a better bet than Mars (for now). Less travel, easier to supply and we can still prove out stations, growing food etc

[bufferoverflow]

> Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system because

That's a false statement. A large enough meteor could cause a sterilization event.

[qubax]

> I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

For the same reason in tech we have backup servers, HA clustering, disaster recovery sites, etc. A bit of redundancy helps in case something goes wrong.

> Earth would be more "hospitable" to life than any other planet in our solar system

Currently, sure. But other planets, especially mars, can be terraformed and made habitable one day ( it would take hundreds or thousands of years ).

> It's much easier to build and maintain a bio-dome in the Sahara desert, Arctic region, Cheyenne mountains or underwater than on Mars.

Sure but a terraformed mars can support more life eventually.

> Earth at it's worst is much better than anywhere else in our solar system.

The same goes for siberia, alaska, canada, etc. There are far more hospitable places to live on earth than those places. But people still explored, migrated and settled. It's human nature.

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted but if anyone is interested in a talk of mars colonization, here is an interesting TED talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9c7aheZxls

[ur-whale]

>I never understood why colonizing Mars is needed.

Correct, but short-sighted.

However much Earth has, we'll quickly gobble it all up.

To quote Bartlett : "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Allen_Bartlett)

The only way out is up, and the first stepping stone is the Moon, next is Mars.

[adrianN]

Neverending exponential growth is not possible through space colonization. We can grow at most as the surface area of a sphere that expands at the speed of light, realistically much slower.

[pferde]

In sufficiently long term, it is not entirely correct, because colonized planets will eventually start sending out colonizers themselves.

[adrianN]

That doesn't work. They'll only reach places already colonized.

[dagw]

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

In which case the second greatest must be to assume that all growth is exponential.