Depends on how you define "permanent" but the closed ecological systems (CES) problem is nowhere near solved.
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.
The history of human spaceflight is pretty much: Problem -> Difficult to find solution -> Solution leads to better spaceflight -> Solution leads to better life for humans on Earth. Then repeat that cycle for each new problem.
Think of the new medicine and hospital protocols that are waiting to be developed as biologists explore the solution to this problem.
Couldn't agree more. But I'd recommend solving the problem before shooting ten men and ten women into the Martian regolith forever and telling them to make babies.
Alternatively, it's not the scale of problem you try and solve fifteen timeslipped minutes and (at least) eighteen months away. We're not even sure what the shape of a solution even looks like, apart from "Generic Future Technology Tree Numbers 4 through 90". Mastery of bioengineering would probably fix it, but it would need to be desktop science, like 3d printing. We are not anywhere near that - mostly because we don't have things like "generic bioreactors" that can grow organisms like a universal womb/seedbed/strata/media.
I recognize human advancement comes with sacrifice. But human advancement also comes with prudent decisions like "don't built the village in the lava".
Is it possible that their arguments haven't been noticed to be debunked? These are apparently the authors:
> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.
Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
> Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.
I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation.
> Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.
Well - it's a tricky one because that is susceptible to slippery slopes. If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS, for example. We can always spend more on Earth to achieve a temporary boon for the current population. We could have not spent money on developing Golang and used the salary to dig wells in Africa, for example.
Spending a tiny amount on space for the chance of a permanent upgrade for the species does sound like quite a good idea, and I'm personally glad the American taxpayer is doing it.
For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.
why do you assume we wouldn't have seen value in satellites if we didn't see value in going to the moon (or mars)?
There's clearly an extraordinary value in satellites from a military perspective, for instance to enable spying. Heck, Hubble directly benefited from the work that went into spy satellites and NASA was afterwards gifted 2 uneeded spy satellites to use for scientific exploration (1 is (was? as in finished) being converted to be used, the other AFAIK is still in storage).
GPS wasn't created to enable us to do anything in space, but to focus down here on earth. i.e. what was needed to fight wars better. One can argue if that was "necessary" but it was clearly earth focused.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have seen value. I'm saying it's always possible to argue value is somewhere else and point at someone in poverty, perhaps. It's easy to see short term and hard to see long term, and I'm saying a balance is required.
> If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS
I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.
I'm saying if we'd decided that Earth-bound spending was more important and we should dig (and then maintain) wells in Africa instead of ever going to space, we wouldn't have useful things like GPS.
As someone from within the space industry, their arguments are beyond bad. Indeed they miss the point entirely. If you don’t see much people talking about it, it’s because most people in the industry don’t want to stoop to that level.
If that's one of the better criticisms of the book, that's a pretty good recommendation for the book. The article author clearly just doesn't like their dream being shattered.
As I said, "doesn't get it." Neither the Weinersmiths nor you seem to understand the motivations of people that actually want to settle Mars.
EDIT: It was just pointed out to me that the meat of Peter's review (parts 2 & 3) are paywalled. What I linked to was more like a summary for a review. Sorry.
Space fan: We're going to make a city on Mars!
Weinersmith: It's going to be hard. There is no air, the ground is toxic, an insane amount of constant work will be required just to stay alive.
> It's going to be hard. There is no air, the ground is toxic, an insane amount of constant work will be required just to stay alive.
I'll go! I'll happily go to die a painful, slow, torturous death on the way to Mars, so that humanity learns what to do differently for the next crew. I'm so enthusiastic about the prospect that even my kids know, given the opportunity, I would kiss them all one final goodbye and happily launch towards the red wandering bright dot in the night sky.
I'm a successful developer, not suicidal, generally happy person. And I've dreamed of such a mission for decades.
There may not be many people like me willing to make such a sacrifice, but it only takes a handful of us to help propel our species further.
Whole article is trying to solve problems of human society through space exploration and colonization. Like trying to mask one's mental illness by not talking about it.
Obviously there are research stations on Antarctica. And presumable your argument is that these are "permanent"? My point is that they are not, not in the sense that we will need for Mars. No one lives there full time, people aren't raising families there, they are very dependent on regular deliveries from the outside.
Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...
Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.
If you want another word for that, go with "Continuous".
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000. But it was not, in fact, expected by anyone to be a permanent station; It is made of non-replaceable parts that age and fail (decade scale), it only has very limited life support supplies on board (month scale).
You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need.
If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you're not alone
The point is that we don't have technology (or at least not proven) to make a habitat on earth that can reliably provide isolation from harsh atmosphere.
When you are sending people to space on an experimental rocket, with experimental supply for an experimental habitat, all of that shit better be engineered to a huge safety factor, because its not a matter of if things will go wrong, its how often will they go wrong and what the impact will be. To deal with that kind of unknown requires a level of technology that should make it possible to live in Antarctica for extended period of time without any external shipments coming in to resupply. That means heating, oxygen generation, food resources, air filtration, full medical bay capable of advanced surgery, and a bunch of other smaller things that all matter in the end.
Are you talking a Mars or Antarctica settlement? ;)
(eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.
No air, scarce water, radiation challenges. Comms to earth has a 3min lag on a good day, 6mins roundtrip. On a bad day it's 45mins.
We are better off at this stage of human civilization to look at building resiliency and redundancy at home. Settling margins of Earth in places like Antarctica, underground, under water is many orders of magnitude simpler than Mars, provides useful models for distant future space colonization, and also provides us with some of the civilizational redundancy and resiliency many space-colony-enthusiasts are looking for.
Nobody’s tried because they are a short flight away from South America. No point. It’s cheaper and easier to fly it in.
There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one.
To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.
Can you explain why and how we would build cities on Mars if we found an alien shipwreck there? That doesn't make any sense to me.
It would likely cost bare minimum 10-100 billion dollars to put a few boots on the ground on Mars, how could we possibly build cities there within the end of the decade?
I'd keep the Moonraker film in mind as a metric for self sustaining colonies created by billionaires. They can't be trusted unless they are also working to fix what we already have.
Yes, we don't experiment on humans in space right now, so there is no evidence, sure. My (limited) understanding leads me to this conclusion for (I think) two _very good_ reasons:
1. The twisting and folding of the heart tube is highly dependent on gravity and micro-pressures of circulating blood in the embryo. I learned that from Dr. Larry Taber at Wash U in St. Louis. In microgravity, there's a very strong chance the heart forms incorrectly or if it does form correctly, it conditions itself for zero-g life, so it will have reduced pumping strength because it never needs to move blood from toe to head against gravity. So, even if you gestate a kid correctly in microgravity, the transition to an environment _with_ gravity could be extremely stressful on the body or possibly fatal.
2. Other phases of gestation _depend_ on gravity. The "baby dropping" around the beginning of third trimester is important to kick start the body to prepare for birth. The baby presses on the cervix to stimulate dilation during the process of birth, etc.
There is also zero evidence to oppose it. We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).
We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).
Blastocyst to embryo. It's not in itself evidence that humans can grow in space. It's evidence that the early stages of mammal morphogenesis work fine. So why conclude without evidence that human morphogenesis probably won't? It's too early to say either way.
> We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good).
But we don't know anything about the long term effect of 0g on human fetuses, which live in a very different environment than the humans we have tested. They live in an environment that combines fluid immersion and surface support, with buoyancy playing a major role -- which could (or could not -- absence of evidence etc) seriously change the importance of gravity for development.
I'd be more concerned about the impact of zero and low gravity on newborns than fetuses.
> I'd be more concerned about the impact of zero and low gravity on newborns than fetuses
I agree with that. If (and it's if) it turns out that zero and low gravity are OK for foetal development, then there's the around 20 years of development that comes after birth and before adulthood, where "fluid immersion" is not part of the normal development process.
That's how reason works. "You can't prove there isn't a silver, bubblegum-farting unicorn living on the asteroid belt" doesn't make it true. Nor more plausible.
Thank you for your restatement of Russell's teapot (1). As an aside that's about unfalsifiable claims and the burden of proof, not logic in general.
But the idea that this is "Nor more plausible" is wrong - there are good reasons to believe that human health and development that has occurred under 1g throughout our entire evolutionary history could go wrong when deprived of that, is in fact a highly plausible idea.
The "extraordinary claim" would be that there is no impact on human health and development from living entirely in (for example) lunar 0.16g.
I'm all for looking into it getting the data, but no space agency has yet constructed the required fractional G rotating structure. Nasa has made plans, see e.g. Nautilus-X (2) and AGOS study (3) but nothing has yet been built "due to budget constraints".
Best case all the Martians get eaten alive by their own skin fungus and/or bacteria in a generation or two. There'll be a collapse in the personal or macro biome - biological systems have Kalmagorov complexity in a vertical like direction.
Shorter term, drawing from actual ISS problems, you get really weird and durable "biofilm" ecosystems sometimes literally exploding since there's nothing up there eating any of the material shedding from the crew and their food and poop and whatever else. Staphylococcus and Corynebacterium (skin commensals) and Bacillus species dominate surfaces. Aspergillus, Penicillium, Cladosporium, and Rhodotorula are some of the fungi. The Japanese Kibo module sampling found communities that shifted noticeably year over year. Thicker biofilms with novel "column-and-canopy" architectures not seen on Earth; probably related, E. coli and Salmonella studies showed increased virulence gene expression in microgravity. There's a Russian paper documenting 234 species recovered from Mir, including fungi actively degrading polymer materials. And this is on an orbital station after a few decades, constantly supplied, wiped down with sterilizers and lysol regularly, with individuals able to deorbit when they feel like it.