What if Mars is the wrong path for Human exploration?

[VSECOTSPE]

Wrong. Nobody ever claimed it was "magical."

Magical is my word.  You put arguments into my mouth that I never made, and you take words out of my mouth.

In the low-gravity environment that we have tested in, rodent embryos/foeti/juveniles never implant, are unable to fold into basic body plans, and suffer gruesome defects like brain voids if their gestation gets that far.  It is magical thinking to believe that these problems will disappear at 0.38%.  All the lines of evidence point elsewhere.  Our species is a product of a billion years of evolution in a 1g environment.  Our gestation and development is adapted to that 1g environment and is finely tuned to take cues from it.  Mammalian embryos/foeti/juveniles do not develop normally and safely when 62% of other major inputs are removed from them.  Aside from faith, there’s no reason to believe this would not be true for another major environmental factor like gravity.

..."my hunch is better than your hunch."

Yet again, you’re putting arguments into my mouth that I never made — this time literally with quotes.

My argument is not a hunch.  It’s based on the evidence directly above.

There is no evidence indicating human gestation and child development will work normally at 0.38g, and a lot of evidence pointing in the other direction.  It is faith-based, not evidence-based, to assume otherwise.

Hey, at least you're no longer bewildered by how a merry-go-round can keep something aloft.

I wasn’t.  I stated that a merry-go-round doesn’t keep anything aloft.

Again, putting statements in my mouth that I never made.

Spoken like someone who's never piloted a balloon.

I actually have, at least as an amateur guest, but as long you’re putting words, statements, and arguments in my mouth that I never made left and right, you might as well make up facts about my life experiences as well.

"Argument By Because I Said So" isn't a thing.

Call it an opinion, if you like.  Prima facie, the idea of building and operating a centrifugal space station on a planetary surface is silly.  Put it in orbit and visit the planetary surface as needed.

Yes. They are accurate though. That's what you really mean.

No, they’re not.  You have to stop putting arguments in my mouth.  Now you’re just stuffing them back in after I spit them out.

You never phrase in the universal case. Too obvious. Instead, you trot out a "special pleading" argument whenever it suits you.

There is no universal case.  That’s the point.  Our species does not adapt to every environment.  Some are too extreme to settle permanently.

That’s not applying a double standard or a special pleading argument. 

Mars is great, as long as no-one ever faces any hardship... any time a hypothetical Mars colonist gets a hangnail.

Ridiculous conflation.  Hangnails are not the same as embryos that cannot be brought to term or major birth and development defects.  Discomfort and suffering is not the same thing as a biological limit.

That's obviously what you really, truly, honest-to-God think, because you (invariably, like clockwork) scream bloody murder

Now you’re reading my mind with your omniscient, god’s-eye view.

You have to stop arguing with yourself and engage in what the other poster actually writes.

The thread title is literally "Re: What if Mars is the wrong path for Human exploration?"

Fine, I started writing about settlement in response to other posters’ comments.  I’ve made clear multiple times that I think our species will visit these environments for exploration and more (research, work, adventure) and that’s exciting and worthwhile, at least for me.

Somehow I knew you'd (intentionally) miss the point.

I didn’t miss the point.  I made a little joke about killing bears and then proceeded (literally), “To the point...”

Obviously there are many families who inhabit extreme environments.

Human families have never settled — lived out decades and raised children — in high-altitude environments that require supplemental oxygen.

Human families have never settled — lived out decades and raised children — in Antarctica.

Human families have never settled underwater or subterranean environments that require living in and raising children in an enclosed environment for decades.

It is a leap from these extreme environments to the much more extreme and distant environment of Mars (or the Moon, Venus, etc.).  If families don’t make these settlement decisions terrestrially, there’s no reason to believe they’ll make them extraterrestrially.

Doesn’t mean people won’t visit Mars, the Moon, Venus, etc., maybe for a couple or few years.  But I don’t see any line of evidence supporting settlement — living out decades/lives and raising generations — in these places.

In fact, I observe that human settlement patterns "skip steps" all the time.

Oh sure, but there’s a qualitative difference between settling a new island with radiation protection, 1g, 1-bar atmosphere, breathable atmosphere, temperature range that doesn’t immediately kill, water, and food sources and an environment lacking all that.  We don’t even take small steps in that direction terrestrially — there’s no families on permanent supplemental oxygen in the Himalayas and no families living in metal cans and pressure suits under the oceans — it’s a leap of faith to believe that families would make such decisions extraterrestrially.

The rising level of general risk aversion exemplified by VSECOTSPE et. al. is occurring society-wide.

That’s a load of malarkey.  People do risky and increasingly risky stuff for both necessary and stupid reasons all the time.  Witness Ukraine.  Witness the explosion of cliff-face climbing and other extreme sports/pastimes.

NASA has become institutionally more risk-averse, which is not a good thing.  But that’s a separate discussion, and NASA doesn’t represent society in any case.

And risk is only part of the decision making equation for families.  Timescale, quality of life, impacts to children, etc. are also part of the equation.

This is, I suspect, one of the Great Filters. As time goes on, civilizations gradually become too comfortable and nervous for something as challenging and risky as space exploration.

Conflates exploration and settlement.  They’re two very different things.  An adventure to the top of Everest is not the same thing as deciding to live out the rest of one’s life and raise children in the thin atmosphere of the Himalayas.  A couple-year expedition to Mars is not the same thing as deciding to live out the rest of one’s life and raise children on Mars.

The argument is "I wouldn't choose it, so I must forbid anyone else from choosing it."

Again, literally putting words and an argument in my mouth with quotes.  Please leave me out of whatever arguments you’re having with the imaginary me in your head.

This is a text-based Internet forum.  I couldn’t forbid anyone from doing anything here even if I wanted to.

And in any event, arguing that there’s no evidence that families will ever make certain choices is not the same thing as forbidding those choices.

https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/phrase/181/

Cute.  I’ll have to remember that.

[Harry Cover]

My pleasure ! Finally - those two years of latin studies in High school have not been a total waste (in stark contrast with this thread, for example). 

[Greg Hullender]

More and more, I feel like the right next step isn't Mars, Venus, rotating space colonies, or asteroids: it's the moon. They've all got plusses and minuses, but I think the sheer proximity of the moon outweighs almost everything else. We need to explore the moon and figure out how to take maximum advantage of it before we make serious attempts to go elsewhere.

Proximity means that it's much easier to iterate on the infrastructure. We can experiment with ISRU without worrying that everyone will die if one or another experiment fails. It means we can easily bring everyone home in a worst-case scenario. Everywhere else seems to require a really high level of technical readiness before attempting much of anything. Most places are so far away that we have to send everything in advance, and God help us if we discovered we needed something we didn't ship. Only with a lunar base can we really take chances and push the envelope.

Building a lunar base first makes everything else easier. We'd learn more about ISRU. We'd learn more about coping with regolith. We'd learn whether 1/6 gravity is good enough, and, if not, how much better it is than zero g. Beyond that, a working moon colony that could make quantities of iron, titanium, silicon, and liquid oxygen would be a great enabler for large-scale missions to Mars, Venus or the asteroids, or for constructing a space colony. (Particularly if they can be cheaply lifted to orbit via a space elevator or a "mass driver.")

The low gravity is probably a problem long-term, although, as others have said, we don't really know that for a fact yet. But, because it's so close to Earth, no one needs to spend years on the moon. We could have a very useful, productive facility where no one spent over a year at a time. Or we could build a rotating habitat the same scale as a proposed orbiting habitat but without having to solve the rotational stability issues that plague such structures in space. That would be worth doing just to do better studies on the effect of different amounts of gravity.

Sure, the moon appears to be so short on hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen that those will likely have to be shipped from Earth. But it's so close to Earth that the effort to keep it supplied needn't be huge. Not for small populations, anyway--especially if they recycle dilligently. If there do turn out to be deposits of those elements on the moon, then larger colonies might make sense someday, but that's not likely to be an issue for the next century or two. By that point, supply from the asteroids might be a good bet.

It's even possible that the moon might have economic advantages that would let it pay for itself directly. E.g. if there are resources like rare-earth elements that we'd rather not extract on Earth due to pollution. I wouldn't count on that, but once we built infrastructure to return material to Earth from the moon it could, in theory, make sense for some things.

The upshot is that I think the moon really is the right next step--not Mars--even if we conclude that no one will ever live on the moon full-time. Our next steps should be to explore the moon thoroughly. We need to know exactly what minerals are really available there. We need to know exactly how much challenge the lunar dust really is. We need a better handle on the radiation issue. And we need to know just how much 1/6 gravity does for us. Once we've done that, all subsequent steps will be a lot easier.

[Greg Hullender]

In the low-gravity environment that we have tested in, rodent embryos/foeti/juveniles never implant, are unable to fold into basic body plans, and suffer gruesome defects like brain voids if their gestation gets that far.  It is magical thinking to believe that these problems will disappear at 0.38%.  All the lines of evidence point elsewhere.  Our species is a product of a billion years of evolution in a 1g environment.  Our gestation and development is adapted to that 1g environment and is finely tuned to take cues from it.  Mammalian embryos/foeti/juveniles do not develop normally and safely when 62% of other major inputs are removed from them.  Aside from faith, there’s no reason to believe this would not be true for another major environmental factor like gravity.

A counter argument is that something is very different from nothing. People can adapt to live at 50% of sea-level air pressure. That's not 38%, but it's still a substantial difference from what we evolved for. People can adapt to live over a very wide range of temperatures than those we evolved for. And to eat very different diets. And to live in utterly different social structures. The point is, we do have some flexibility; we just don't know how much yet.

Like most things, there's probably not a hard cutoff. If we do animal experiments, we'll probably find that (say) at 50% of normal gravity, 90% of mice reproduce without problems, but at 38%, only 50% do, and at 17%, only 10% can reproduce successfully. It might be possible to breed for this. E.g. after five or six generations, mice in 38% gravity might be back up to 90% success. Or limited interventions might make a big difference. E.g. 1g for a few hours a day during pregnancy might be enough to eliminate most of the risk.

We just won't know until we do proper experiments. Then we'll still have a hard conversation about how to apply these results to people, but at least we'll know what we're talking about.

[JohnFornaro]

More and more, I feel like the right next step isn't Mars, Venus, rotating space colonies, or asteroids: it's the moon.

I have long been a Moon firster; three or four days away.  Enough gravity to golf, at least.  And a spectacular view of the Earth.  Building a Ring Station requires an awful lot of material, and the Moon is lowest in delta-vee and time of travel for supplying that material.  I've toyed with the idea of mining the asteroids, but I'm letting TransAstra do the heavy lifting on finding those candidates. 

Ya gotta have the lunar mining industry before you can have a ring station.  And ya need to build a mag lev rail gun too.  All of this infrastructure will require a lunar base with a log of people on it.

So yeah.  Luna is the next step.  And the ring station the step after that, which will teach us if we can spread thru the inner solar system or not.

[JohnFornaro]

Our species is a product of a billion years of evolution in a 1g environment.  Our gestation and development is adapted to that 1g environment and is finely tuned to take cues from it.

This is my top concern. Just last year, I was still bandying about my long held idea that if we just build a one gee station, all humanity's reproductive issues in space will be solved.  Thanks to that goofy propellantless drive thread, I've done a lot of reading, both trying to understand their ever changing concept, and learning more about some of the fundamentals of physics.

As I stated earlier above, now I'm not sure that AG will trick our reproductive systems into believing they're in an earthly gravitational field.

I'm not sure that NSoV works either.  Couples would have to volunteer, knowingly volunteer,  to have their pregnancies monitored by doctors more than ever before, as well as their children's health till at least adulthoo.  There's also the side effect of side effects on human guinea pigs.

The legal and religious issues involved are in frontiers that we haven't yet "explored" in the least.

I started writing about settlement in response to other posters’ comments.

And I'm glad, at least, that you followed the thread's evolution.  Often, threads veer into what the group wants to talk about.  I'm kinda tickled that the "Is Mars the right target?" thread is now pointing to Venus!

We just had Exploration Mission 1 with Artemis, seemingly proving that humans aren't even necessary for exploration.  At least the idea of "settlement" includes human settlement.

As to Latin, I trot out my usual advice:  Semper ubi sub ubi.  Always where under where.