Science Youtuber Sabine Hossenfelder and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Science communicator and astrophysicist claim there is no business case or economic reasons to go to Mars. They also claim there are technological reasons why it cannot happen.
They claim Mars cannot be Terraformed for 100s of Years and this would be a show stopper.
They claim Elon Musk and SpaceX cannot succeed with Government help
Sabine says the Only? reason to go to Mars is to Save Humanity in the Long Term.
Sabine claims there will be Opportunity Costs? Nuclear Fusion? AI?
I argue the opposite is true in all cases. I claim that huge profits can be made on Mars and that Terraforming is not needed for the first few decades. I claim partial terraforming can work in an affordable and useful timeframe.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
If SpaceX industrializes cislunar space first, there will be plenty of wealth to colonize/terraform Mars. Building surface, or underground facilities will be everyday, and making the massive parts of the hardware to do so will be much cheaper.
Colonizing Phobos, and/or Demos would be relatively easy with a prebuilt habitat/ship modules built in lunar orbit, and “flown” to the Martian moons. Just put them together, stake them down, and go to work. One module of the Phobos station could be a ready made centrifuge that would double as a solar storm shelter. All the modules could go at once for safety.
The issue as I see it is human kind’s suitability for Mars. Humans as currently constituted are intrinsically connected to the Earth. I do not believe humans can sustain a life long term, let alone for a lifetime, on Mars no matter how much their habitat is made to resemble a shopping mall.
No business case to go to Mars? That’s the great thing about Musk, even with his faults, he doesn’t need no stupid business case to go to Mars: https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/memes/Musk-mars-humanity-a-multi-planet-species
And ironically, doing things without first thinking about profit has made him the worlds richest man.
I think that the essential concepts to making Mars into a ‘civilizational foothold’ is to guarantee: a large parcel of ‘utterly owned’ land to anyone rich and self-reliant enough, opportunity to return to Earth periodically, and a modern/ reliable level of services/comfort and earth-communications at a predictable cost. Add in a supportive centralized (sub-terranean (ahem-sub-Martian) only) transportation (if only a pedestrian/track tunnel) and amenity/ community facility and there will be sufficient, if not significant, demand.
So, 1000x starters each with 50-minimum-acre plots supported by one or two communal tunnels each (shared per spoke) that provide conditioned access to a centralized amenity with reliable utility services, assuming you have your own localized 20-year air, heat, food, and essentials’ supply (replenished each decade). I envision a pie-shaped 1000-unit ‘community’ layout organized around a central hub amenity/ transportation hub. Each slice contains the many score Units, not too close to the middle to avoid land shape distortion, along with the common sub-grade (below your property cube) tunnels to access your unit property. Only such unit owners have community and regional votes. Living spaces within the hub is rental and hotel only (and as a holding area for civilizational emergencies). We assume that you can travel back and forth from Earth once a decade (to recover, etc.,), that your chosen abode is mostly sub-grade with minimal above-grade port, vehicle garage, and minimal viewing areas, and that there exists a level of technology that requires minimal-to-no ‘expertise base’ such as medical, engineering, legal/admin. If we could pull off this greenfield (ahem redfield) development at a few dozen 1000-unit enclaves providing minimal cooperative support at a start-up of a few $M plus a few $M per decade each Unit to keep the system going and get you back and forth once, this would be the starter – on top of the $1T and 20-year start-up lead-time investment and robot pre-arrival work, possibly paid back over 100+ years by all Owners, etc.
Ideas of terraforming, big business, monster exploitation regimes, etc., are possible but they should not underwrite or shape the development. It is essentially a homesteader culture with pockets of civilization, when well-scattered could easily get into the multiple-millions over decades – with opportunities for short-term/ transient stays much higher than that. Assumes vastly extensive technological inovation and infrastructure development in space, autonmous machinery/bots, a geotech soil that supports easy tunneling, life span and health improvements, and a very-minimal ‘liberal-support-style’ value system.
One thought for those hoping for a “libertarian”, or bottom up, future on Mars. I am not a political or social scientist but I would hazard a guess that the most common type of rule throughout history has been top down (dictatorships, monarchies, tyrannies). A classic case is after the Russian revolution where Stalin eliminated all competition.
A Mars colony will be even easier to control when the survival of all is reliant on key technologies and services which can be under the control of a powerful individual and his “security team”, especially with surveillance and AI to help. So a top down solution may well come to pass.
[ “producing on higher cost with fewer common resources is no reasonable concept” ]
The business case is weak. A Mars colony is going to need a lot of technological imports from Earth. It will be enormously expensive to import anything. Exporting back to Earth will also be expensive. Mars is also a difficult environment to work in. It is extremely cold and without breathable air. I have yet so see a convincing argument for Mars having a comparative advantage for making anything that can be sold back to Earth.
Colonising America was a different situation. There was fertile land in abundance, fresh water, timber, game to hunt, etc. There were resources that could be harvested or farmed and shipped back to the mother country. Things like timber, firs, sugar, tobacco, cotton, etc. These were things that couldn’t be sourced back home and the cost of transit was low enough to allow them to be sold for profit. Is there any comparable resource that can be found on Mars that cannot be produced more easily on Earth? There are other differences too. It was relatively easy to build a self sufficient life in colonial America. There was free fertile land, air to breath, abundant water, animals to hunt, etc. Mars is a global desert in comparison. It will take a lot of complex and expensive engineering just to survive there. What are those colonists going to sell that can pay for that? Data centres and giga-factories are unconvincing. We can build those things much more easily back on Earth.
The core of the business case for Mars is it is a free land, with no governments and everything they do. No war, no taxes, no bs, no parasites. Certainly, wherever people go, they bring all that with them – there is no escape from that, humans cannot escape from human nature by moving bodies. But it is an opportunity to make and normalise changes.
Second point, which Musk sadly does not get at all, is one does not need to colonise or terraform Mars to achieve the desired multi-planet state. One may use Mars as a resource base, but it lacks important factors to be a permanent place to live – gravity, magnetic field, radiation level, numerous cycles. All that can be accuratelly recreated in a space station or a ship, in whatever scale and numbers, and placed in whatever orbits – around Mars, Moon, Sun or anywhere else. Building such things in cis-Lunar space would be far better business-wise, with much easier and constant(!) access from Terra, and materials from Luna. Once built, the station-ship may move to Mars orbit over years at low thrust, or stay in cis-Lunar space, whatever its purpose might be. It can be huge, it is not pressed for time, and it can have population living in physiologically normal conditions. Mars will never have them. Mars is for robots, same as Luna and Void.
For those concerned about ROI – the off earth colonies will become far richer than the earth economy. The ROI will be there in the colonies.
Mars has geology similar to Earth’s and nobody has done any gold mining. Gold should be about as readily available there as it was on Earth, 5000 years ago.
Sending it back to Earth would be cheap. Delta-v from surface of Earth to LEO is 9.4 km/sec. Delta-v from surface of Mars to low orbit around Earth is 9.5km/sec, and aerobraking takes it to the ground. So it should cost about the same to bring cargo back from Mars, as it does to launch the same tonnage from Earth to LEO. At scale, that cost is about $50/kg, so launching 100 tons of cargo from Mars back to Earth should cost about $5 million, assuming fuel production on Mars. Arguably you should pay more in capital cost since it’s a long trip, except there are going to be a lot of Starships on Mars with nothing better to do. The cost to build a Starship is currently $90 million, so that’s about the upper limit on trip cost.
A single Starship load of 100 tons of gold is worth about $8 billion at today’s prices. That would be about three percent of what we mine on Earth every year, so it wouldn’t crash the price.
Of course, SpaceX could also use Mars as home base for mining missions to metal-rich asteroids.
We really should build a rotating station in LEO with 1/3 gravity, so we can actually test this. It would have other benefits too: it’d be healthier than a zero-g station, but cheaper than a one-g station.
Eath has had four billion years of plate tectonics and water action to sort ores into usable concentrations, Mars not so much. This is especially so for uranium – most of the ore bodies date from when Earth’s atmosphere was oxygenated, so that uranium oxides precipitated out onto the surface of rock particles at boundaries of oxygen saturation in groundwater.
Fuel on Mars would be much more expensive than on Earth. Here you drill a hole in the Eagle Ford shale, pipe the methane to south Texas, stick it in your rocket (along with some of the oxygen abundant everywhere.) On Mars you’d have to make all that from water ice (thin on the ground), CO2 (from the very thin air, or polar ice), and electricity. Solar intensity on Mars is about half Earth’s, nobody will be making solar panels there in the near future, and even on Earth the solar-powered methane industry is kinda sluggish.
As for the Starship, Elon has been assuring us since 2017 that one would reach Mars in two years. Saturn 5 had launched a crew round the Moon by its fifth flight, so far Starship hasn’t even reached low earth orbit – and that with no load on board. Now he’s talking about Starship models 2 and 3 – but he’s already spent most of the money he was supposed to get to the Moon with.
Too bad you can’t terraform gravity:
“Another thing you never see from the Mars Society is a realistic discussion of what would happen to the human body in the low Martian gravity. Zubrin has discussed at length the need for artificial spin gravity on the 6 month trip to Mars. But he assumes that the problem ends once the astronauts land on Mars. The problem of bone loss in a 0.38g field on Mars for ~18 months is completely ignored.
When I read Zubrin’s book The Case For Mars, I was so intrigued by this surprising omission that I consulted a friend who is a space medic at JSC. He tells me that this issue was once discussed at a conference of medical doctors who had actually worked with the long-term residents of Mir and ISS. NONE of these experts thought that humans could adapt permanently to Mars gravity!”
See:
https://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-05zzb.html
They think, nobody knows.
My personal take is yes, we can. Even childbirth can happen, but for safety reasons, it would be better to have a spinning residence for pregnancies.
And for the chance of eventually losing the ability of returning to Earth, that might have surprisingly little importance for permanent colonists.
“There is no way home” (cit.)
On Mars, probably, humans would need to go to the Baby grown in vat strategy and keep the vat on permanent spinning.
This, also, should make terraforming just not interesting: or you do 100% terraforming (including gravity) or it is of little use.
Better have artificial gravity (spinning) habitats underground for people to live in when on rest or pregnant or for babies than 1/3 gravity atmosphere outside.
With enough energy (nuclear or solar) you can mount the habitats over and surrounded by magnets and spin then as much as is needed and useful.
There are those who see an empty place, groan and say it’s a wasteland.
There are others who see an orchard there, get excited and work towards making it reality.
Mars is worth very little today. But it doesn’t have to remain so.
And if Musk is good at something, is at finding untapped market needs, invest in them, and bring them to fruition.
Doubting the guy’s flair for extracting business from nowhere is a serious mistake. One that doesn’t surprise me from these commenters, because despite their credentials, they aren’t entrepreneurs nor very imaginative.
A good thing on Mars is “NO Taxation” and very, very, very little regulation.
You work, you build wealth for yourself and your descendants. And must make provisions for bad days, too.
What bad things could happens if the government don’t tax away more than half of the wealth you create, inflate your money and regulate your life and business to oblivion and beyond?