Is it worth it for people to go to Mars or to any other planet in our solar system?

>economically, fuck no
Sounds like what Romans claimed about Germany, now look at them

Also we only have very small idea of what minerals might be hiding under surface

Germany still doesn't have great natural resources and certainly didn't have anything the Romans wanted (easily accessible metals/stone, salt, spices, ivory, etc).

the point is that it costs a gajillion dollars to launch even a small mission to a Solar System body, it offsets any value you get in resources, including gold/diamonds/whatever

What the fuck else are we gonna do OP? Keep jerking off here and just create increasingly more dopamine-inducing entertainment that makes us into complacent pleasure zombies?

Fuck that.

>Sounds like what Romans claimed about Germany
they were right. The only reason to go into Gaul and Germany was to eliminate the tribes there because they were an existential threat to Rome. That and to increase Caesar's e-peen to immense status

I am saying natural resources aren't that much necessary. You see them as a colony, as something from which you should have immediate profit. Ensettlement of Mars would be an investment in the future, it would cast shitton of money for start, but in time, when it would become self-sustainable, we would get all of it back.

if the numbers added up, Elon Musk would be on Mars right now. It simply isn't a feasible investment at this point. People don't make money by dumping a gigantic pile of it on some rock and then hoping it pays off, you need tangible future profit

I mentioned resources because that's the obvious drive for space exploration, as it was for Earth exploration. Assuming no ongoing planet-wide catastrophe to kick us the ass

>the point is that it costs a gajillion dollars to launch even a small mission to a Solar System body, it offsets any value you get in resources, including gold/diamonds/whatever

That's the dumbest thing I have ever heard. As progression occurs, which is inevitable to long as you are learning effectively costs will go down as better and better techniques to achieve goals appear. What are we going to do when we have exhausted all our earth resources and are still on this planet with literally no way to get off it? Ride it into the sun?

FUck outta here. We are the greatest plague the universe is yet to know.

>costs will go down
of course, they're still way too big now though
>What are we going to do when we have exhausted all our earth resources
then it will become feasible to go into space

they had timber for a thousand years, position, and genetics, and mines, metalurgy, access to the eastern

These

>of course, they're still way too big now though
A hur durrrr and how do you drive down the costs? You use the methods available at the time and improve on them. Holy shit.

>then it will become feasible to go into space
Do you have any reading comprehension? Once you have exhausted all your earthly materials it's literally impossible to get off of earth, that was the scenario I posed you, which you dodged.

>You use the methods available at the time and improve on them.
we're doing that right now. Still haven't improved them enough.

>Once you have exhausted all your earthly materials
what useful materials do you expect to find on the Moon or Mars? Oil? Coal? Timber? I have bad news. If we run out of those we can't go out and get them

No

Basic economics really. Any investment into colonizing and/or terraforming Mars will need to be a very, very long term investment. Nobody (including Musk, NASA, the UN, etc.) will invest in something that won’t pay a return for at least a couple of generations.

So forget about it until we have the technology to get to Mars within a week’s travel and for less than $ 1,000 per kilogram or so.

What we can do, and actually are doing, is the scientific exploration of Mars and the solar system. Mostly via probes and robots. This is proving so successful; and is becoming ever more successful at such a rate, that it is actually decreasing the viability of manned space exploration.

>we're doing that right now. Still haven't improved them enough.
Literally what? Kek. I am done.

>what useful materials do you expect to find on the Moon or Mars? Oil? Coal? Timber? I have bad news. If we run out of those we can't go out and get them

Holy shit, you are actually retarded. Go look up a list of invention by NASA, which are off-shoots or variations of the things they used on their space ships, cordless technology is one.

We simply cannot know what exploring space will bring us in terms of technology, that's literally impossible. If you think it's about resources and not the pure aspect of exploring the final frontier, something man has dreamed of doing, since forever. You may be an idiot. Resources are literally a bonus.

>We want to go to space
>too expensive
kek.

"exploring the final frontier" costs money which we don't have and requires technology we still don't have access to

what do you actually want? Humanity to end war and hunger and focus on spending trillions on space ships to Jupiter hoping on the 0.0000001% chance there is something to find there or that just by building them we'll accidentally stumble on FTL/replicator technology?

>reality
>your view on reality
you know what to do

We cannot colonize mars.

Regardless of what we develop or do to/on the planet one constant cannot be changed: Mars has 1/3 Earth's gravity.

It can't be permanently settled. Settlers on the planet would suffer a host of chronic maladies and their children would likely be evacuated.

Giant honking space stations a la Gundam could happen though....although everything would always be uphill so that would suck.

But we can already do that, just toss some nukes at it

What on earth do you think that would achieve, apart from slightly more radiation

This is why capitalism is a shit-tier socio-economic system.

It stifles creativity, exploration and scientific advancement in favour of profit.

>inb4 "capitalism is the natural state of economic systems"

It's about as natural as a prosthetic leg.

Also Side 3 would declare independence and drop a colony on earth.

That'd be some shit.

Melt its polar ice caps which would kick in the terraformation of mars

>capitalism is the natural state of economic systems
Normally when people say this they mean markets and private property rather than actual Capitalism

Not the guy you're arguing with, but try and cut out being such a cunt with all this shit-flinging.

>Go look up a list of invention by NASA

Basically every single benefit derived from space travel hasn't actually come from space, though. It's come from the process of getting into space exclusively using resources we had on earth.

The logistics involved in actually extracting resources from another solar body are retardedly huge. It's easy to say "yeah don't worry science will solve that" but you can say that about fucking anything. You can just say "we'll just Science our way to a post scarcity society here on earth and never need space" but in either case it's a worthless statement if you can't substantiate it with a cost-effective method, which we presently lack.

>f you think it's about resources and not the pure aspect of exploring the final frontier

Exploration - at least its funding - has always been motivated by a desire for gain. For every guy who just wanted to go and explore you had the guy who paid for it, and it's incredibly rare anybody does that with zero expectation of a return on their investment.

You're acting way too fucking smug for the lack of actual facts you're able to bring to the table, everything you say hinges on the idea "science will sort it out for us." or "we should do it just because man! SPACE!" Try being less of a shithead.

No.

Much more economical to just fix shit on Earth.

But we don't know how to do that, so we dream about Mars. Which will never solve our problems - we'd just take them there with us.

I guess we just need to do that and then wait a few million years and we'll be golden.

Terraforming mars wouldn't make it habitable because it's gravity would still be a third of earths

What did you expect terraforming to be like?

Name another method that doesnt involve space magic

Humans would eventually evolve to live with that gravity

>muh economics
Nobody said he meant worth in the literal sense

Of course it isn't economical to send people to Mars thats not the fucking point. Its as much to say that we did something that our ancestors could only have dreamt of. The man who first sets foot on Mars will have his name enshrined in the annals of history.

>This is why capitalism is a shit-tier socio-economic system.

First, this tells me you have a very limited understanding of economics. Probably none at all beyond reading a review on Piketty

Second, ANY system of economics basically faces the same central problem: How to allocate limited resources. Going to Mars is absurdly expensive, no matter how you organize your economy.

You're joking, right?

need to advance some other technology first

What's with the obsession with Mars? Is it a leftover meme from when people actually believed there were people on Mars?
Mars is pretty much useless. Useless for space travel hub, too much gravity and atmosphere, and useless for living on, too low gravity and no protection from the Sun.
For a space travel hub, the Moon would be much better. It's much closer, and has lower gravity.
For human colonies, Venus is far more human friendliy. It's closer to Earth, has a protecting atmosphere, high enough gravity for humans to live on, hot enough to grow plants. Why can't we focus on Venus instead? If we tried everyone here could probably live long enough to see it happen. But no, everyone focuses on useless and overly difficult Mars instead.

You are literally retarded if you think humans are not going to be exploring space even without the added bonus of resources.

Do you think when man dreamed about the stars they thought about all dat gold up dur?

You're a fucking idiot.

You're right, the Hippy Dippy Alliance of altruistic Fortune 500 billionaires are known to be romantic dreamers and they'll pay for it. Or maybe some lonesome stranger on a space dinghy will go exploring, for old time's sake

isn't venus a fucking toxic hellhole

What the fuck does this have to do with history?

it's future history

It's a philosophical question about the worth of exploration when it doesn't bring any real material gain. Or something. Humanities.

It's not like it's any easier to breathe Martian air. You still need protection. The idea of a Venusian colony is to have balloons floating in the atmosphere. Regular Earth air would float on a level just below where you'd have comfortable living temperatures, so you could pretty much live inside the lifting balloons with only some really minor separate lifters on the side to get it up to the perfect temperature for living. I bet it'd be easy to send stuff down to the surface from there, just use a parachute and then to get up again just fill a balloon with compressed air, no rocket fuel needed

this board is humanities too dingus

the end goal of sending mankind to mars may not be all that gamechanging until it's absolutely necessary for us to leave Earth, but what is developed in the process of a trip to Mars may be very helpful in advancing technology.

if the original space race is responsible for commonplace technologies today like Microwaves, advances in food preservatives, wireless communication, and advances in jet propulsion, who knows what awaits to be developed in another concentrated effort towards technological development in the name of going to Mars.

Well but honestly, if we're already handwaving the lack of magnetic field, the temperature, the atmosphere, etc. why can't we handwave the gravity? Is artificial gravity that much more implausible that all other elements of terraforming?

nuke the polar caps, transfer nitrogen from jupiter with spaceships, release extra oxygen into the atmosphere with genetically constructed superalgae, raise the temperature with greenhouse and all the processes previously enumerated, spin up the inner core with powerful magnetic field projectors for a more powerful magnetic field (obviously pump in more metals into the core through supertunnels while you're at it) and create portable micro black holes for localised gravity regulation and you set to go.

The great fuck up of golden age Sci fi was encapsulated in Arthur C. Clark's vision for a GPS satellite: it turned out to be a great prediction, but he imagined it as a huge space-born city because he thought it would need a full time crew to replace the vacuum tubes.

What he didn't take into consideration is that a few cubic centimeters of silicon is a hell of a lot more cost-effective than a living crew compartment and avoids a lot of thorny ethical issues like the cost of a return ticket and the long term effects of zero g and solar radiation on the human body.

Robert Heinlein assumed that ships with a long voyage would need a repair crew, but it's much easier to just radio your vessel a software update than it is trying to send people along with it.

Anywhere that you can send a person, you can send a robot made to perform whatever task you need from it. On Mars, for example, we sent basically a full science lab on wheels with a robot arm. Meanwhile the human crew remains on Earth and gets to live normal lives. If we start branching out into things like asteroid mining, it will almost certainly be done the same way: using tele-robotics.

Literally the only reason to send people to Mars is to have a photo op. Humans will never need to live on Mars for the same reason why they don't need to live in the Gobi desert or Antarctica, which are dramatically more hospitable places to live.

If we want to improve humanity's long term chances for survival we'd get much better results taking care of the planet which we are uniquely suited to living on. Lebensraum is not our most pressing issue, it's the fact that we're letting a small fraction of people royally fuck up the ecosystem sustaining us. Sure there's the possibility of an asteroid smacking the Earth and wiping out all life, but we'd do much better investing our energy in redirecting the asteroid than we would trying to flee the Earth (and save a heck of a lot more lives in the process).

Best post on Veeky Forums I've ever read.

>*unironically and sincerely applauding*

>create portable micro black holes for localised gravity regulation
yeah... gravity doesn't work like that. black holes don't have more gravitational effect, only as much as the amount of mass they contain. you replace the sun with a black hole and our orbit stays the same. the mini black holes that are made in particle colliders have almost no mass at all

I know it's fun to parrot what you've read but it doesn't apply in this case.

Black holes are literally the densest "gravity filed generators" in existence, so if you had a meaningful ability to create and regulate their mass, you'd be able to create a 1G environment.

Of course, the optimal way would be putting that black hole in the center of Mars, but with creative arangements in orbit and below ground, you could make distinct localised gravity environments.

gravity field* of course...

thank you very much

That latency though.

You're going to run into ping spikes that are literally impossible to avoid under the current laws of physics.

Is it worth it for anything we will get from Mars? Probably not, no.

Is it worth it for the technological progress we will gain from the attempt? Yes.

What you're claiming is literally as stupid as "hurrr why didn't the Sumerians established a transoceanic commercial route to Australia using junks to mine uranium deep in the aussie desert and ship it back on those junks to Sumer???" "I mean, like, why not dude?"

But it's still not entirely clear if humans can survive for extended periods of time in zero g without the protection of Earth's magnetic field. Hell, the Apollo astronauts were barely gone for more than a few days and look what it did to them
space.com/33571-apollo-astronauts-heart-risk-deep-space-travel.html
Even just going into Earth orbit astronauts need to exercise constantly or their bodies atrophy to shit. And that's just the tip of the iceberg when discussing the host of technical challenges facing a long-term/permanent human presence in space.

Of course there might be solutions but how well do those solutions scale cost-wise to the solutions for the problems caused by latency, like smarter and more independent robots?

Yes, for the scientific advancement that we will have to go through to get there. Also it could be a step towards asteroid mining.

You can float balloons in the atmosphere actually. It's so dense and mostly co2 so regular air floats in it at an area between 0-100C. Still not great but could be useful for studying gas giants.

I was figuring that more complex algorithms and autonomous AI would be the solution.

That and a centrifuge to combat zero g syndrome.

Economic profit is not the only reason to go explore other planets. If it's funded by the government they can do it for the sake of science.

>costs money which we don't have
Do you live in Africa? We have plenty of money in America.
>requires technology we still don't have access to

Holy shit, that's why we keep work on it. Do you expect the technology to pop out of thin air if we don't work on it?

>But if we're just going for science
But why send a fragile, squishy person when you could one of these bad boys who doesn't even care if we just leave him there after the mission's over?

>You know the government can just fund space exploration within a capitalist system? That's a far simpler solution.

...

>autists still acting as if mixed economies don't exist

To be honest, the low gravity is actually one of the easier hurdles to overcome. Daily centrifuge 'workouts' and 'heavier' (more massive) clothing (such as garments with weights sown into them , for example) can be enough to counteract the worst effects of muscular and osteo dystrophy as well as other illnesses caused by the lower gravity.

The lack of a magnetic field or atmoshpere are to much more challenging obstacles engineering wise.

A few inches of steel, a foot of dirt, or about three feet of water, is sufficient to counteract the radiation caused by the lack of magnetic field on Mars.

Yes, any atmosphere you create will eventually leak off, but it'll take hundreds of millions of years, and even under current technology, you could easily produce it faster than you'd lose it.

But while adults can live in 1/3rd gravity indefinitely, with a minimum of extra effort, prenatal development and child rearing would be a problem.

It seems mice can gestate fine, even in zero G, and can get over the various problems that result in a short time when introduce to normal gravity - but humans are a lot heavier, so I suspect there'd be more problems. However, some of those problems you could write off, provided you're willing to live with the fact that the child born on Mars would never be able to visit his folks on Earth (at least not with great amounts of aid).

It may actually be advantageous, though, as there's some evidence to suggest that, often, calories not used in muscle mass during development get eaten up by the brain. (So you may wind up with weak, glass-boned, super nerds.)

But if you don't wanna breed mutants, the low gravity of Mars also makes shuttling to and from a space station, spinning with artificial gravity, easier. So you could have maternity wards and child rearing centers in orbit.

They're still wrong, though they're only wrong by 95,000 years instead of 100,000.

>If we want to improve humanity's long term chances for survival we'd get much better results taking care of the planet which we are uniquely suited to living on. [...] Sure there's the possibility of an asteroid smacking the Earth and wiping out all life, but we'd do much better investing our energy in redirecting the asteroid than we would trying to flee the Earth (and save a heck of a lot more lives in the process).
You're neglecting the fact that asteroids are but one of thousands of potential global extinction event phenomenon that could render this biosphere untenable for human life, both cosmological and terrestrial, and a good many of those, you never get to see coming. Seems we discover two or three more every decade, and every now and again, INVENT a new one. (Even with simple asteroids, you can't see the darker carbon ones coming. We had near misses by two different fatal asteroids in the 90's, and didn't see either until after they passed.)

Really, given everything we know that can go wrong, the closest we have to scientific evidence of divine providence, is the fact that there's only been five major global extinction events, and not five thousand. I wouldn't want to count on the universe, and the Earth itself, to continue to being so merciful, nor against our own propensity for genocide, be it accidental or deliberate.

More importantly, you're neglecting the fact that it's not as if we have to choose between the short term efforts of ensuring shit doesn't go to hell her insomuch as we can, and the long term effort of setting up backup plans outside this fragile biosphere. There's more than enough people around to work on both.

>>another world not susceptible to the damage we have done to earth
There's no way we could fuck up the Earth to be worse than a place with literally no air.

>Earth to be worse than a place with literally no air.

What you said is literally pointless as we can already live in areas without oxygen, thanks technology.

Once you get a way to manufacture things in space, it will become really feasible to expand. The cost of making that happen is pretty high right now though.

Set up raw materials processing stations, and the mined asteroids will have a place to go. Once you have processed materials you can start building things. Then the cycle will just sustain itself.

>fairly small asteroid by intra-solar standards hits Earth
>gg civilization

Most of that list is retarded. The nearest Quasar is like, 10 billion light years away. And we've already cataloged nearly all of the asteroids large enough to cause a Chixulub style disaster, the ones that are a danger are the city-killer sized ones. Any planet you live on is going to have this risk.

And alien invasion is just stupid. Space is too vast, and there are much more readily available resources in much shallower gravity wells for space colonialism to ever be feasible.

>Only been five major global extinction events
six actually: you seem to have forgotten the one we're currently going through

>More importantly, you're neglecting the fact that it's not as if we have to choose between the short term efforts of ensuring shit doesn't go to hell her insomuch as we can, and the long term effort of setting up backup plans outside this fragile biosphere. There's more than enough people around to work on both.

And you're neglecting cost-benefit analysis. We have scarce resources and extremely pressing problems that need to be addressed immediately. Sending even just a flyby robot to another star would be an investment on the order of tens of trillions of dollars in today's currency, meaning that sending people to another planet to live on it is probably not something that's going to happen in the next 500 years. In the meantime, there's important work to be done in things like fresh water conservation and sustainable energy, if we want our society to be around in 500 years.

>Portuguese get to Brazil
>Lol there are no resources here, lets make a pretty letter about trees and ignore this gold-less land
>Turns out it's full of everything
Imprssive

I like to daydream about deploying a massive soleta to block the sun on Venus, cooling down the atmos and gradually introducing oceans by obtaining ice from the Oort cloud, and somehow speeding up its rotation so that 1 Venusian day = 1 Terran day, even though I know that if ever this process becomes feasible, the same technology can probably take us to much more hospitable planets outside the solar system.

>Is it worth it for people to go to Mars or to any other planet in our solar system?

1. be the first
2. come back alive
3. profit!

>Germany still doesn't have great natural resources and certainly didn't have anything the Romans wanted (easily accessible metals/stone, salt, spices, ivory, etc).

Ivory and spices you will only find in southern regions. But valuable metals, stones and salt had was and is there. Also easily accessible. Germany is still number 4 in worldwide salt production. Right behind much larger China, US and India . All unknown to the ancient Romans.

>Most of that list is retarded.
No argument there, quickest list I could google up.

>The nearest Quasar is like, 10 billion light years away
The nearest active one is 1.7 billion light years away, which is almost too close (that's how nasty these fuckers are). There's a smaller, dead one, about 0.73 billion light years away, but it's double conundrum as to why it burned out, and to why it didn't fry us ages ago. It may yet flare up again, and scientists still don't know why it hasn't.

But there's always the risk of one being *born* in the center of the galaxy. They put out several times the total energy of the galaxy, and the end result would be to flood the whole galaxy with so much heat and radiation that life would be unsustainable pretty much everywhere. It'd take about ~100,000 years for that energy to propagate, but as radiation travels at about the same speed as light, you wouldn't see it coming.

Granted, at that point, being on Mars doesn't help. Any underground colonies on Mars would have more time to dig deeper than the surface dwellers on Earth, but that'd be about it.

>And we've already cataloged nearly all of the asteroids large enough to cause a Chixulub style disaster
No, we estimate we've cataloged less than 3% of them. Gravity scattering indicates there are several asteroids larger that Ceres in the asteroid belt, but they are too dark to see, and too distant to obscure enough stars to have yet been detected. There's also, near as we can tell, a planet with the size of Neptune just outside Pluto's orbit, and we can't find that either, we just know the orbits of the kuiper objects indicate there must be such a beast. Really, the odds of finding anything that isn't highly reflective (either largely iron or covered with ice), are slim to none, even when they are inside our own solar system. The best we can do is infer their existence by the way things orbit about.

And again, we missed not one, but two, killer asteroids in the 90's.

>And you're neglecting cost-benefit analysis. We have scarce resources and extremely pressing problems that need to be addressed immediately. Sending even just a flyby robot to another star would be an investment on the order of tens of trillions of dollars in today's currency, meaning that sending people to another planet to live on it is probably not something that's going to happen in the next 500 years. In the meantime, there's important work to be done in things like fresh water conservation and sustainable energy, if we want our society to be around in 500 years.
There's already proposals to just do that for under the 500 million mark... But once you have solar system colonization in progress, you also have a lot more capacity to collect resources. As it is, NASA eats less than 1% of the Federal budget, while social service programs eat better than 50% of what's left over after the DoD gets their cut (which is more than half of the total). Most of the resource shortages we do have are artificial, politically and economically motivated, and really, we're as close to resource independant as we've ever been. There's certainly no shortage of labor, and that, and the idea box, is all you really need. Well, that, and the one thing we're really short of - motivation and long term vision.

Maybe we'll get lucky, and some asteroid we miss will kindly wipe out a major city or two and wake us up, before any of the thousands of things that would just wipe us out completely comes along, or we simply do it to ourselves.

If the first thing on our minds is profit when it comes to space exploration at this point, our chances of real progress in it are well and truly fucked.

I have a feeling you are making some strong assumptions.
If we could then yeah it would be worth it pretty far of obviously

It prob be more worth it to just make free floating settlements in space like the ring in interstellar

Yes, of course!

Do you think people said 600 years ago "Is it worth for people to go to *North America*?"

Exploring is in human nature and in the best interest of the preservation of the human species

A Martian history thread?
no.

There was live an available and easily accessible resources in Earth travel
space travel is literally throwing money away

The lack of venus being mentioned in this thread is depressing. People are very uneducated. At least read some fucking wikipedia articles or something before talking about this subject.

Over sea voyages took lots of money as well, why do you think Columbus spent 8 years trying to get someone to fund his voyage?

If humans developed technologies towards an end goal (i.e interplanetary space travel) it will become cheaper in time. It will be a multiple generation project, but in the end looking back, the humans 100 years from now will not think of it as us "throwing money away".

Venus would be the idea planet to colonize (about the same size as earth), but how the devil are you going to terraform that monster?

you don't

two words:
>floating
>cities

I think we should first settle Moon.
>closer to Earth, means cheaper transportation
>good place to create space transport hub due to low gravity, also can mine asteroids from there
>Helium-3

What about the disastrous long term effects of low gravity on human bodies?