Really? Why? Aren’t there enogh bloody people in existence already?
I like Elon Musk. I really do. But I think his whole mission to mars is totally misguided. I think the best way to invest in humanity’s future is… by creating longer-lasting protection for the last remaining wilderness areas. If that is what leading biologists say we should do, then that is what we should be doing!
I think he’d be better off buying up a huge chunk of forest somewhere and just… leaving it intact. No human intervention. Or, if he must ‘build’ a structure, design a bloody great hermetically sealed dome over the top of the canopy, and just lock people in there for five or more years. It’d be cheaper, better for this planet.
How many emissions do those rockets make? How many emissions do making the rocket parts make? It’s just totally a waste of time buggerising about terraforming mars when we already have a terraformed planet here with millions of more naturally occurring species on it.
Technology got us here in the first place, it won’t save us now. The only thing that can save us now is … not clearing any more new land, increasing the size of existing wilderness areas. And planting lots and lots of trees all trhoughout suburbia.
Hello Dr. Brown,
I appreciate and share your passion for conservation of our planet, but I would like to provide some information and counterpoints to your assertion that colonizing Mars is “totally a waste of time”.
Regarding “creating longer-lasting protection for the last remaining wilderness areas” I completely agree with what I have quoted, this should happen and protection should be expanded as much as possible, however, this is NOT mutually exclusive with colonizing other planets. In fact, I believe that it will make it easier due to my next point below.
“Aren’t there enough bloody people in existence already?” Yes, Earth is over-populated and will continue to be. Now, I am not in the camp that believes “We should pack up and move to mars” this is silly, a colony of 1 million people is but 0.014% of the 7 billion+ people we have on Earth. What I am convinced of is that the need to develop closed-loop ecosystem habitats and the tight-knit communities living and working within them will have an enormous impact on how we may structure living spaces back on Earth.
“better off buying up a huge chunk of forest and building a dome” The dome part of this is just silly. I am sure you are aware that sealing the forest off would prohibit it from contributing to the global carbon cycle. The forest would likely be just fine, but it wouldn’t help remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Regardless of the dome statement, buying a couple thousand hectares of land and then just letting it sit, would not only have a completely negligible impact on the planet. (Earth is BIG, even buying up the forest equivalent of a megacity is peanuts compared to the vast forests of Siberia, Canada, or the rainforests of the Amazon or Congo.) but it would also(and most importantly) have no economic benefit.
Emissions. Large rockets burn hundreds of tons of propellant to reach orbit, this is inevitable and inherent to how rockets work. Currently most rockets are expendable, which means that after they burn the propellant they fall into the ocean or burn up on reentry, SpaceX is working towards making their rockets reusable, which will greatly cut down on not only cost, but also the environmental impact of manufacturing a new rocket for each launch. It’s also worth noting that the Raptor engines, which are in development for the proposed Mars rocket, burn methane as opposed to kerosene. Methane only releases water and CO₂ when combust, kerosene is much more nasty.
I hope you enjoy my book of a comment, I encourage you to refute and debate with me.
Look forward to hearing from you,
Paxton
Ah!
It’s nice to see people finally taking notice of this blog. :)
Hello Paxton Hodgson. Debate is of course welcomed. Thanks for your extensive comments.
Regarding my ‘dome’ comments:
I know at first that seems like a preposterous, ludicrous idea. Note however that I first said: “I think he’d be better off buying up a huge chunk of forest somewhere and just… leaving it intact.”
Never did I say making a great big dome would be *better* than *not* building a great big dome.
And the reason I bring up the silly idea of making a dome at all is because — well, isn’t that what Mars colonists will essentially be doing? It’s silly enough here. We know that already. So it’s even sillier there. If we wouldn’t do it here, why would we want to do it there?
Why do I say that? Where is the glass going to come from? Where is the metal going to come from? There are no hardware stores on planet Mars. There are no mines and hence no raw materials. Just rocks. If it has to all come from Earth, that is not at all sustainable for either planet. Is it?
So if they did want to start off on the right foot, then they should source the materials locally. And that means trying to figure out how to make a type of cement or concrete with Martian soil. And shit like that (study, research) takes time, money and engergy and resources…
And yes I am well aware that vast tracts of forest remain on Earth. But we are still encroaching on wilderness areas all the time. Queensland has one of the highest land-clearing rates in the world (apparantly). We are urbanising, well, everywhere. Same with Brazil. The only reason more of it hasn’t been cleared is… believe it or not… annoying little mosquitoes. That tends to retard land development a bit, when you have dozens of mosquitoes buzzing around people’s heads.
Biologists are the ones that say that habitat destruction is the biggest threat to biodiversity, not me. My background is Materials Science. Which brings me to my next point:
What I thought on my walk today can be summed up thusly:
Nature is still winning the “chemical & microstructural” ‘battle’ with humans. We make poison, nature comes up with defense mechanisms. Antiobiotic resistance, etc. I think you know what I’m talking about. It’s actually pretty resilient in that sense. It’s not as fragile as some people think.
But on the “macro” scale, it’s a very different story. Humans are clearly winning that war. They’re winning all over the whole world. We’re clearing spaces faster than nature can catch up with us. Natural processes are very slow, because life is essentially a molecular-scale ‘additive’ process.
So now to the idea that a billionaire should spend their money on land and just leaving it the hell alone. Well no, it is not so stupid. Do you know what the price of rural land is in places like Australia? It’s actually way cheaper than city rates. That would be a better buffer reserve or whatever Elon Musk calls it. I am not talking about thousands of hectares. It would need to be much more.
Take Siberia for example. Mr. Putin now wants to give land away for free to encourage people to develop there. So in that sense, if a billionaire (or soon-to-be trillionaire) comes along and retards that process a bit, well, good.
That is a far better investment in *Earth’s* future. And Earth has way more probability of species’ survival today than Mars does now. To put it bluntly, Mars is barren fucking wasteland, okay.
Please, I encourage you to search this blog for ‘Mars’ and read my other comments regarding Mars colonisation.
Is space travel and Earth protection fundamentally mutually exclusive? I don’t know. But I do know that if we want to be sustainable in the long term, the future is probably going to have to look a lot like second-world countries today. Because they still beat the first world in terms of energy efficiency and even sustainable materials…
Hello again!
( Sources cited as (#X) at the end of my post)
I want to address buying land and holding it first, alternatives to the land clearing we are doing second, and then I will discuss Mars colonisation and domes, etc.
Purchasing land:
Personally I think that Australia and its land prices are a bad example of the kind of land that you would want to be purchasing, given that a large majority of the land area is arid desert. Regardless of this opinion, I would like to use your example, Queensland, to run some numbers on what would be possible for a billionaire to obtain.
According to RuralBank.com.au (#1) the median sale price of farmland per hectare in QLD is $3,500 AUD, which adjusts to $2,676 USD. Using this number and Elon’s net worth ~$11 billion we can figure how much land could be purchased.(This assumes that purchasing the land wouldn’t require any legal battles, and that there would be no tax, as I am unfamiliar with Australian tax code and this is completely hypothetical)
$11 Billion / $2,676 is equal to 4,110,612 hectares or 41,106 sq/kilometers.
The total land area of Queensland is 1,730,648 sq/km(#2) so Elon would be purchasing 2.3% of Queensland, or 0.53% of Australia as whole(7,692,024 sq/km)(#2) and 0.031% of the total land area on Earth(129,736,436 sq/km)(#3). I am still very comfortable with my stance that this is “peanuts” and not a particularly productive use of the money.
As I stated in my last post, I think conservation is important extremely important and would like to see it expanded, I just don’t think billionaires are going to be the ones to do it.
Alternatives:
As total human population increases globally we will inevitably need to develop land in order to house and feed all of these new people. You stated in your first post that technology wouldn’t save us, and that the cessation of land clearing was the only thing that would. I would like to offer that technology has the potential to save us and our land.
Cities do not currently produce food, they rely on vast amounts of arable farmland to sustain them. Since most of this new population growth will be within cities and urban areas, I believe we should be developing ways to produce far more food within urban areas.
Roof top gardens, vertical farming, hydroponics and aquaculture should all be incorporated into civil design in the near future.
Here in the U.S, monoculture crop fields account for 18% of our land usage, through hydroponics and vertical farming, large amounts of this land could be reclaimed.
Minus roof top gardens, the tech I mentioned is all in the early stages of development and still needs to become economically viable. As solar becomes the dominant form of energy generation these methods will be far more available as the current hold up is energy consumption.
Interestingly enough, these technologies will also be vital to a Mars colony, so if they are not developed for Earth, they will be for Mars.
I’m going to hold back on talking about sustainable housing as another alternative, as this is my future career field and I could talk about it for days, don’t want to get too off topic.
Mars and domes.
Regarding domes “It’s silly enough here. So it’s even sillier there.” No. Domes can actually be fantastic on Earth, geodesic dome houses are extremely sturdy and energy efficient. A giant dome over a forest that cuts it off from the atmosphere is what’s silly.
“Isn’t that what Mars colonists will essentially be doing?” and “why would we want to do it there?” Yes, Mars colonists would have to live inside of some form of habitat. This could be a dome or domes, but will more likely be primarily underground to protect from radiation. On Earth the surface is peachy, no dome needed, on Mars, the surface is not, it’s as you said barren wasteland.
The “why there and not Earth” part is especially interesting because a giant oversized dome may actually be easier to construct on Mars than on Earth. Mars has only 30% of the surface gravity of Earth, so you could potentially build structures far more massive on Mars than back home.
Mars and materials:
Sourcing the materials locally is definitely a necessity, that is one of the main reasons that the SpaceX plan is to develop such a massive rocket. In order to mine and process materials on Mars, you need to bring in some initial heavy equipment. Early on equipment will be brought with to produce all of the consumables(foodstuffs, water, oxygen, fuel, etc) Eventually, 5 – 10 years after the first mission, when you have a couple hundred people on Mars, you can start to produce equipment of all kinds locally.
Mars concrete has been developed already(#4) “The best mix for producing Martian concrete is 50 percent sulphur and 50 percent Martian soil with maximum aggregate size of 1 mm” However an industrial process for production has not been laid out.
As for glass, there have yet to be any studies to the best of my knowledge. However, I am confident that it can be done, due to your background I am sure you are aware of the many materials that can be used to make glass. There is known to be silica in the Martian soil. That’s your raw material. Heck, there is probably enough aluminium oxide in the soil to make industrial sapphire if you REALLY wanted something strong.
Two questions:
The mosquitos being a hold up for deforestation in Brazil. Can you provide a source? If someone told me logging in the Amazon stopped and asked me to guess why I would probably say it had something to do with their recent political instability. Mosquitos would be the last thing on my mind.
The future looking like second world countries and that they beat first would countries in efficiency. What do you mean by this? What countries are you thinking of? The five largest CO₂ producers are China, US, Russia, India, and Japan. Of these I would only consider the US and Japan first world. I also know that lots of people in poor countries rely on biofuel(wood and plant matter) for heating and cooking, this is highly polluting due to the carbon monoxide produced, CO being a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂..
Cheers,
Paxton
Sources
#1: https://www.ruralbank.com.au/assets/responsive/pdf/publications/farm-land-values-2015.pdf
#2: http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/dimensions/area-of-australia-states-and-territories
#3: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.K2
#4: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/545216/materials-scientists-make-martian-concrete/
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide comments (and meaningful, referenced content).
I know I make light of some points. And it doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. It’s just that I think what we are seeing is that our civilisation has reached a peak. And I think the only way to go slightly backwards. Less is more.
So I’ll talk about your last point first. All second world countries, to my knowledge, use less energy per capita than the first world countries. That’s what I mean by that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
(please be sure to click the heading “total energy consumption per capita per annum” to rank or sort the data in terms of energy use)
You will see that apart from the middle eastern countries, the West by far consumes the most energy. Some countries rank higher because they use more energy for heating purposes. Now if we really ‘superior’, certainly we would have a lower energy consumption than the “poorly developed” countries?
The average Moroccan person uses less than a tenth the energy of an Australian citizen. But are Australians really ten times happier than Moroccans?
Vanuatu, for some strange reason, is not listed. Vanuatuans use an average of 181 kWh per person per annum. And yet they are one of the happiest people on the planet, because they have a lot of art, culture, language and music. Not to mention fresh, natural food.
So if we wanted to cut our energy consumption b y a factor of ten, then we really only need to look at the less developed countries. Because surely our power stations are more efficient [overall] than theirs, right? In Spain for example, where I lived for some eight years, they use brooms to sweep the floor rather than vacuum cleaners. No electricity required!
They don’t have many kitchen appliances. That’s what living overseas has taught me. Minimalism is a basic zen principle.
So on to my next point.
Elon Musk is not the only billionaire. Nor is he the richest billioniare. I am not saying that that is the only ‘solution’ to Earthbound problems. But if we all made changes “a bit here and a bit there”, they start to add up. They could make a contribution. If more of them did this, I believe the world would be much better off than if they didn’t. What is going to happen if they don’t? These areas are only going to get urbanised and this will further threaten biodiversity. Rural queensland is not as arid as you might think.
“62 Billionaires own as much wealth as half of humanity”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/62-billionaires-own-as-much-as-half-of-humanity.html
“Ultimately, we found 1,426 billionaires who are together worth a total of $5.4 trillion — a record sum.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/03/04/what-the-combined-wealth-of-all-1426-billionaires-could-do/#251327eb1fd8
I noticed you have made a mistake in your calculations. You have extrapolated the percentage of land area of the whole world, but you have only used real estate data from Queensland.
Even so, Elon Musk’s worth, as a fraction of that owned by all billionaires, is 0.2%. One five-hundredth. By your own calculations, 500 x 0.031% = 15.5%. I’m sure land in The Congo is even cheaper than in rural Queensland. I am not about to get into real estate calculations. All I know is that when Forbes magazine states the richest X number of people own as much as the poorest 50%, well, I’m sure their money can go a long way. I don’t know how far. but it’s not 0.031%
That surprises me about the Martian concrete though. That’s good that people are thinking about that. My next question is: where would the sulphur come from? Earth? Or would that need to be extracted too? Because I don’t know of any sulphur
Here is a quote:
“All the materials are in situ, so there is no need to bring them, which makes the construction also sustainable,” Cusatis says. “You might need a solar panel to use solar energy to melt the sulfur, but that’s about it.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/mars-house-concrete/423402/
So my next questions are (because I like to follow the principle of “the five whys”)
How many solar panels are needed to melt the amount of sulphur required?
Or are we going to have to rocket in enough solar panels to build an extraction facility now? $$
One might then ask: “how can solar panels be made of local materials?”
Doesn’t creating solar panels also require lots of energy?
Yes it does. Where is that energy going to come from?
Do you see how this is becoming like a never ending loop?
It’s a never ending loop of inefficiency, because this Earth is subsidising our oxygen, water and food production. We don’t need to do anything ourselves, we just take it from the environment. Well okay, we do have farms here. But we don’t have to extract the water from the atmoshere ourselves, do we? We don’t have somehow create an oxygen-rich enviornment for these things to grow in, do we? We don’t have to make soil, do we?
So now all of a sudden, we’re going to have to start making all three things available ourselves. Completely on our own. Way way away from home.
The thing is, I do know a thing or two about materials, and I just don’t ‘see’ (meaning I can’t visualise) factory workers wearing gas masks. Personally, in my humble opinion, we’re not ready for it. I am not saying “it can’t ever be done”. I am saying it’s going to be A LOT harder than people think. Yes, all of these individual problems can easily be overcome. Combined they represent a prodigous design & manufacturing challenge.
So I think the one thing that we are going to learn from the Mars mission, I can see it already, is that we should learn to start appreciating nature’s services to us back here on Earth. We might be the most technologically advanced species, but the other species are still supporting us. Without them, it’s a thousand times harder. I think Mars economists are going to learn the hard way. If the mission has to pay for itself, I don’t think it be economically viable for a long time to come. Centuries.
I think the trouble with this generation is that we are trying to do everything “now now now” and we’re just not thinking of future generations enough. So this blog… is really intented to be read by people in 500 or 1000 years’ time. That is my hope. I hope it starts a revolution. Honestly.
Yes people have lived in small teams alone in domes located in the desert and whatnot. But did they build the domes themselves? No they did not. So I think that should be the next step. Go into a remote desert, here, and then build the whole lot, this time tracking how much oxygen, water and food is consumed.
I think people will find that while rockets are using combustion as a primary means of propulsion, it’s not really helping Earth at all. Quite the contrary. It’s only contributing to the Earth’s problems. What is the cost of the rocket fuel in terms of Earth’s resources? How much CO2 do they produce per kilogram of material launched into outer space? I dread to think. I might calculate it when I have more time.
Re: glass. Yes glass can be made from many different compounds. All low temperature glasses are relatively weak, relatively speaking. If they weren’t, we’d already be using them. The most basic glass we presently make, soda-lime-silica, has to be heated to 1675°C in a furnace in order for the raw ingredients to melt. So my first question is: how many solar powered glass refineries exist here on Earth? To my knowledge, none. Not a single one. What people are going to start realising, is that all of the current, common fabrication/extraction methods use heat.
Even the raw material used in additive 3D printers has first been melted. All of it. The only manufacturing processes that don’t use heat are … wait for it… the natural materials. Things like wood and paper and products made from natural-fibres.