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[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I have never declared installing humans on mars impossible, I am certain it could be. Merely extremely difficult to the point of not being done.

Think of it like this, who lives in Antartica? A staff of scientists and their support staff, and virtually nobody else. And that is a place with Oxygen. It is only there for research, funded at a loss by governments, once governments decide they are done supporting it, it is gone. People are there just to be there, they dont live there, they visit. That is not a colony, it is at best an outpost.

For an alternate option, arctic mining. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stunning-photos-of-a-siberian-gold-mine-only-accessible-by-air-or-ice-road They pull gold from the ground in an incredibly inhospitable place, but because there is gold, there is funding to have people, that is how I envision space colonies, with stations set up on small moons or in lagrange points, built solely to service mining machines and the humans who service them. Even that isnt truly a colony, its a fly in fly out job, with perks installed by the company to draw people in.

These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs.

As a former restauranteur and current food manufacturing employee, this is only half true.

Burger flipping robots can be done, and we are seeing larger chains working towards that end, but, they arent done because restaurants remain a high risk enterprise, with an astonishing number of them failing very fast. Thus you have lots of humans, because while they are inefficient over time, in the short term they are cheaper than all the money spent on automation, for now. Robots are really expensive, getting cheaper. I think the next big moneymaker will be leasing automated restaurant equipment out on a monthly basis. The "burgermaster 5000" that slots into the kitchen and can produce burgers. Another is we havent truly found out how to automate cleaning, and cleaning is SUUUPER important for food safety, also super destructive to equipment.

Regardless, people worry about automation destroying jobs, I dont, in the last 100 years we have automated like crazy AND live longer working lives AND we brought women into the workforce, and somehow we are not plagued by a shortage of jobs. If history follows this trend, we will have more stuff per hour of labor put in, that is usually a good thing.

In the long run, I suspect advancing automation will effectively destroy scarcity of basic goods, making all our current economic models obsolete, but its basically impossible to accurately predict what will come of that.

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[–] rwbj ago 

It looks like this boils down to economics and physical viability. I think we both agree that the physical viability will be there, so I'll go with the economics side.

I think the most accurate way to look at this is really simple. You have a Venn diagram with two groups - those that can afford to go to Mars, and those that want to go to Mars. The market for people that would want to go to Mars, for whatever reason, is already likely in the millions. The big problem is the people that can afford to go to Mars. We need to get the total value of the overlap between those two groups to be greater than 'x' where 'x' is the total cost of a mission + sustenance.

And that's really the entire point of SpaceX. SpaceX today are working against their own short term interest. They can successfully get things into space and cheaper than most anybody else. Given the huge barriers to entry in orbital level spaceflight if they just charged what the market could bear, they'd be seeing far greater profits. But their goal is precisely to send the cost of spaceflight way down. They recently succeeded in reflying a previously flown and recovered rocket - something most were saying would be impossible not that long ago. Following this Musk has stated that he believes they can imminently get the cost of flights down about a hundred fold. Today a flight costs about $60 million. That'd be $600k for an orbital launch, which is just insane to even think about. To put that into context, Virgin Galactic has booked hundreds of individuals on 5 minute suborbital flights into space at $250k/person (long before they should have started accepting reservations, but that's another topic.) Suborbital flights being some orders of magnitude more simple than orbital flights.

Now anyhow the point here is that SpaceX's goal is not to launch rockets, but to begin to develop what I think we can really finally begin to call space ships. This is the ITS or interplanetary transport system. The goal there is to get the cost, per person, down to about $250k. And given the trajectory of SpaceX that's about the point that they're expecting to begin to see the economics of Mars travel begin to be economically viable. There's definitely a long way to go and I see an extremely strong argument that things could end up being delayed (their current timeline aims for the first human flight to Mars in 2024 - that would of course be specialists, not general access) but I can't really see any way that it simply cannot work and again in the relatively near future.

I also don't think we're left to put all all our eggs in one basket. SpaceX has a number of private competitors who are even more well funded and are racing behind them, like Blue Origin. And it's also possible that the old giants like Boeing and Lockheed might one day start trying to do something other than collect fat taxpayer checks. They have some plans, but they seem incredibly conservative/risk averse and expensive. Assuming SpaceX manages to send two humans around the moon next year, as they've announced, that will likely be a sharp reality check for the old giants.


Very interesting on the failure rate of restaurants. I had not considered that, though I was also speaking moreso of franchised locations. It's really incredible how much every little nuanced bit of every one of these possibilities has so much room for discussion. Automation opens up even more. For the sake of not writing forum novels, I definitely agree on automation completely upsetting our standard economic models making it difficult to try to discuss beyond that horizon in any way beyond completely blind speculation.

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[–] Mathurin1911 ago 

I think the most accurate way to look at this is really simple. You have a Venn diagram with two groups - those that can afford to go to Mars, and those that want to go to Mars. The market for people that would want to go to Mars, for whatever reason, is already likely in the millions. The big problem is the people that can afford to go to Mars. We need to get the total value of the overlap between those two groups to be greater than 'x' where 'x' is the total cost of a mission + sustenance.

You havent quite gotten what I am saying. It is possible right now to send people to the moon and build a city on the moon, or mars, that we agree on, I just dont think you understand how hard it will be. Indeed there are people who want to do it and who have enough money to do it. It is irrational. Humans are not strictly rational, but their irrationality has hard economic limits.

Humans dont actually go somewhere and live there for no reason, or just because they want too, there must be something there, some reason to stay, usually an economic one. Some humans go to awesome places to come back and tell the tale, but thats not a colony. Its possible that one day we will have hotels on the moon/mars, but it is unlikely. Colonies are not made by Armstrong or Shackleton, they are made by people whose name you will never know.

So what is on mars other than that it is awesome, strange and new that will cause people to go there to stay, beyond the history makers looking to be in books and have buildings made after them.

I also don't think we're left to put all all our eggs in one basket.

With current technology levels and the advances in the forseeable future, we still would be. A mars colony would have to have the equivalent of a chip foundry (among many other things) in order to be actually self sufficient, otherwise a natural disaster on earth would just doom the colonists to slow death trying to kludge together failing systems without parts. While they are working on making 3d printers able to print circuits, nothing yet implies they could produce usable integrated chip level stuff, even with advances.

Modern people dont have to deal with maintenance very much, so they dont tend to think about it, but the effort required to maintain a habitable space on mars makes it highly unlikely to be a real colony for some time yet.

Dont get me wrong, I love the ideas, I just dont find them feasible.