This One Problem Makes Returning from Mars Impossible |Sir David Attenborough
We’ve successfully sent humans to the Moon and brought them back safely, but Mars is a completely different story. The distance alone is staggering—hundreds of millions of kilometers—and a round trip mission could take nearly three years. Once astronauts land on Mars, they can’t just leave whenever they want. They must wait for a narrow launch window that only opens every 26 months.
Can you guess the two words that prove Sir David Attenborough wrong? Not literally wrong, philosophically wrong.
The only way you’re getting humans to Mars is if you can couch it is an existential threat to the survival of the nation, like the Space Race with the Russians during the Cold War.
No middle or working class American is going to be willing to fund Elon’s vanity project with more taxes on them, plus crappier health care and housing.
While true what you say it does not answer my question. On the plus side, we are lucky to have people who dream impossible dreams.
A hint, it’s what separates doers from reporters. Reporters should not predict the future, just explain the past which Sir David Attenborough is very good at.
I have not been able to verify that but I noticed that there are a bunch of similar videos so this is probably a spoof. Thanks for the heads up.
They are “Humanoid Robots.” If you send machines instead of humans there is no need to bring them back and the 80% of the problem disappears. Instead of return fuel you send useful stuff to build the Mars installations. Humans go to Mars only after the Mars base can support them and can return them.
I’m kicking myself for letting the video make a fool out of me.
I didn’t watch that video, but the general opinion is that that’s the most practical way of going about it. It will just cost too much to send enough fuel to Mars for a return trip.
But I disagree about the humanoid robots. You’ll need AI robots, but you’ll want them on wheels or tracks.
Or nonhumanoid robots. Or a mix. Or nonhumanoid robots first, and then humanoid ones later. After all, we’re sending nonhumanoid robots now.
Honestly, it seems pretty unlikely we’d send humanoid robots to do this job except (perhaps) at the very very end of the mission, for all the reasons we’ve discussed in the humanoid robot threads.
…and it is time to accept as a fact that human biology is profoundly embedded on and in our home planet in every way imaginable, and then more that we do not comprehend yet. If we care for ourselves we MUST care for our nursery room earth for some looong time to come.
Yup. If you think fixing the climate crisis is going to be expensive here, just wait until you find out how expensive make Mars habitable is going to cost…
I won’t belabor this. Pretty sure I mentioned this last time a Mars thread came up. Our kidneys can’t handle radiation well. So, in the time it would take to get to Mars, the astronauts would be in the early stages of renal failure. They would never survive the return voyage. And staying there without an atmosphere or magnetic field would also result in renal failure.
Anybody we send to Mars is dead within about year.
This is the one element in Andy Weir’s The Martian where he went full applied phlebotinum - magic rather than science. He had to assume the existence of a fictional shielding material that could protect the protagonist and the other crew members from the massive radiation doses they would otherwise be exposed to. All of them otherwise would have died from radiation exposure.
You could also protect yourself from that radiation by living sufficiently deep underground - some 10-15 feet deep. Any human presence on Mars would likely have to be completely subterranean.
I loved that movie, but I did pick up a few problems. Curse of being a physicist. For example, the winds on Mars would never be able to topple the space ship, nor blow away Watney. It can kick up a lot of dust, but you wouldn’t notice the wind pressure on you.
Also, when the habitat failed, duct taping a plastic tarp would never hold atmospheric pressure. Just back of the envelope, at (let’s round down) 14psi, and with about 28 sq feet of tarp (6 foot diameter, 4032 sq inches). 14x4032 is 56000+ pounds of force. We can assume the Martian atmosphere is 0 psi, for our purposes here (it isn’t…but it is significantly less than 1psi).
Still, a great movie. What did you think about the legal questions posed? Specifically, the act of “piracy”, and the “colonizing” by growing crops? Are those actual “things”? Would Mars be within any legal jurisdiction for any of that to apply, assuming it is real?
They are interesting questions, but I don’t think they have any answers.
I think I’ve mentioned from time to time a book that I thoroughly enjoyed on space colonization, called A City on Mars. The author devotes a fair amount of time going through the various obstacles to space colonization, including legal issues. There isn’t a whole lot of actual “law” governing these sorts of things, since many of the legal principles that used to govern how nations acquired “uninhabited” lands (which were often quite inhabited) have dubious legitimacy these days. We really don’t have a settled set of rules on how nations and/or individuals would “acquire” ownership interests in a celestial body.
BTW, the reason that he talked about the absence of a legal framework was to debunk a bit the notion that we would make the human species more likely to survive if we became a two-planet species. He thought the opposite might be true. Competition among nations to seize colonies during the Age of Exploration led to a lot of conflict, so the act of trying to establish colonies on the Moon or Mars might end up precipitating serious wars here on Earth. While having a Martian colony might make it more likely that humanity could survive an extinction event here on Earth, trying to establish such a colony might make one such event (nuclear war) a bit more likely to happen.
Edit: my own two cents is that any human activity on Mars is most likely to resemble Antarctica, rather than anything else - a scientific outpost that humans go to for short but temporary stays, and no one lives there permanently. Given how lethal the environment is for humans there (the air is toxic, the soil is poisonous, the radiation levels are off the charts, the average temperature is -80 degrees, etc.), there’s no reason that anyone would want to start an actual colony there. Sir Elton had it right…
I haven’t been to Mars but this has become an interesting discussion!
About ownership, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” In Venezuela it is written into the Venezuelan Civil Code, once settlers occupy a property for four years (I think it is), they acquire ownership rights.
So you didn’t buy the answers in the movie? You are, after all, a real estate lawyer.
I suspect being a lawyer affects how you watch movies like being a physicist affects how I watch movies. You pick up on stuff and say “that isn’t right”. A lot of times I just suspend disbelief and see if the story is compelling, physics errors notwithstanding.
You’re absolutely right when it comes to things like courtroom scenes (I don’t go to court, but everyone has to learn basic civil and criminal procedure in law school). They’re often completely wrong, and it takes some effort to keep the suspension of disbelief.
A lot of law is pretty specialized, though. It’s not like I’m familiar enough with the law governing international claims on terra nullius to know what’s going on. In fact, I actually did a quick google, and I was wrong (at least on the formalities). There is an international treaty governing facilities and claims in space. The substance is what I recalled from the A City on Mars book - the treaty basically says that there are no “colonization” claims on celestial objects the way you would lay claim to lands on Earth.
In seeing that, I also found out that most of Watney’s pronouncements on his legal status were incorrect as well. Unclaimed celestial objects aren’t governed by the “law of the sea,” and when he leaves his Hab he’s not outside of anyone’s jurisdiction - national jurisdiction follows the personnel in space, so he’s always subject to U.S. law. Which means he’s not a pirate, because seizing the other spacecraft would be legally allowed under U.S. law under the necessity doctrine (and permission to do that is almost certainly implied as well). But again, I didn’t know any of that during the movie, and it did not in any way keep me from enjoying it.
