PloS One is not really open access... The vast majority of journals function under a Subscription/Paid open-access model, PloS One just mandates the second option.
I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.
Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.
>"MAVEN has observed the Martian upper atmosphere for a full Martian year, and has determined the rate of loss of gas to space and the driving processes; 1–2 kg/s of gas are being lost."
>"MAVEN has observed the Martian upper atmosphere for a full Martian year, and has determined the rate of loss of gas to space and the driving processes; 1–2 kg/s of gas are being lost."
>"MAVEN has observed the Martian upper atmosphere for a full Martian year, and has determined the rate of loss of gas to space and the driving processes; 1–2 kg/s of gas are being lost."
Oh, I was thinking in terms of the cost benefit of terraforming. If you magically make the planet's atmosphere 1 bar of co2, how long would that last at a usable level - say at or above 0.5 bar - assuming no replacement?
If that's 10k years it's less appealing, but 1m years might be worth it.
I think he's pointing out that we have cold and arid environments with a standard atmosphere and surface gravity, and a magnetosphere to deflect cosmic rays that we don't colonize right here on Earth. Traveling millions of miles at huge expense to try this on Mars doesn't seem like a sensible endeavor right now regardless of its feasibility.
I believe they are saying that the Mars landscape is akin to the regions he listed and that these native locations are far easier to develop or live on than going to another planet.
They are hundreds of times easier to settle than Mars, and probably richer in resources, so settling them would seem like a good first step before thinking of cities on Mars.
Comparing Siberia, Sahara, Antarctica or the Australian outback to Mars seems flawed because there are many places that are a lot better suited for human activities and settlement on Earth. We would not want to go there unless other options are ruled out. So emphasis is "on Earth".
Mars might not have regions that are better suited than these inhospitable parts of Earth but it has the feature of "not being Earth".
Consider it a backup/fallback for the "single point of failure" that Earth currently is not just for humanity but for all of life in the universe that we know of.
Now that we are developing the technical abilities to be able to remove this possible failure point and to finally add some redundancy for life, I think we are almost morally obligated to do so.
The point where Mars could be some sort of viable backup of anything on Earth is centuries and trillions of dollars away. Up until a Mars colony(ies) has enough local infrastructure and industry to be entirely self-sufficient it's survival will require access to Earth's infrastructure and industry.
Mars also has fewer natural protections than Earth: a thinner atmosphere, no magnetic field to speak of, and no giant moon that deflects or absorbs at least some percentage of objects that would otherwise impact Earth. So Mars is more susceptible to dangerous radiation and object impacts than Earth.
For the same cost outlay (or way less) as trying to make Mars an effective backup for Earth Earth could be made more robust and dedicated purpose-built backups could be created.
Mars as a backup of Earth is like a cheap eBay thumbdrive hanging from a wind chime on your patio is a backup for your data.
> See it as backup/fallback for the "single point of failure" that Earth currently is (not just for humanity but) for all of life in the universe that we know of.
What could happen to the Earth that would make it even close to as inhospitable as Mars?
Very little, if anything. Which means that it'll be a lot easier to resettle Earth from Mars if something cataclysmic happens to civilization here than it was to settle Mars in the first place.
It hardly matters that the apocalyptic Earth is more hospitable to human life than Mars currently is if we don't have any humans left to resettle Earth.
What could kill all humans on Earth, while leaving it hospitable and re-settleable from Mars?
Even if a huge asteroid hit, we could almost certainly build shelters where more people could survive the initial impact than we can settle on Mars in the foreseeable future.
Even a partial ecosystem collapse would make it a tremendously difficult multi-generational effort to return to modern levels of technology.
An analogy: a bunch of important files become corrupt (cataclysmic event) and the domain expert is no longer with the company (loss of knowledge and industry). It is much easier to move forward if one has a way of contacting a subject matter expert (Mars colony) to restore or rebuild what has been lost.
Even if we distribute such library and manufacturing vaults and ensure they are staffed by those who can use them - the world that arises post-cataclysm may not be one of great cooperation. I can foresee scenarios in which such valuables are used as tokens of power to subdue neighboring factions.
I believe we also need a colony to hold on to seeds of civilization in the very sense of the word.
Again, why would the colonists on Mars, a much more resource-restrained environment than the post-cataclysm earth, be any more willing to cooperate or bring back or perpetuate civilization as we understand it today?
So of course it takes some time for the Mars colony to be at an appreciable enough size to be viable as an Earth backup. But once it is there, the colony would be have the incentive to start Earth back on the path to being support for Mars.
Sorry, but again - so would everyone on Earth, to the same extent. And if some on Earth would be unwilling to share resources and information with each other, they would have even less reason to trust Mars.
We could, and we have, but how useful would they be? What are they missing?
It's like making a backup of your computer but never testing restore. The chances of that backup not being complete or recoverable are fairly high.
The backup of human civilization on Mars will probably be theoretically worse than one that can be made on Earth. But it will be supporting life, making it fully tested and thus practically better.
Yes, but it would cost millions of times more resources and energy, and it will not be achieved until well after such technology becomes trivial to deploy everywhere on Earth.
It does not take an event that makes Earth as inhospitable as Mars. It only needs to be bad enough to remove our capability to go beyond Earth to doom life to be limited to Earth itself. If life should persist in the long run, we need to start spreading it beyond Earth.
We might not colonize a neighbouring star system in the near or medium term future but I am convinced that if we do not start moving out into the solar system, we never will go anywhere else either.
I still don't understand what kind of event could make the Earth so inhospitable that we lose the ability to leave it, but it would leave Mars with this ability intact.
Mars has no fossil fuels, so that can't be it. Minerals cant really be destroyed or exhausted. Technological knowledge is much easier to preserve from cataclysmic events on Earth than it is on Mars (if we fall under some kind of technophobic super empire that seeks to destroy this type of technology, that will as easily spread to Mars as to the rest of the Earth).
That seems much more doable than having a completely self-sustaining space industry on Mars (from mining to chip manufacturing and everything in between, all life support functions intact, all underground or in heavily radiation-shielded buildings, and no fossil fuel plastics, all spanning the Martian globe to actually get access to the various minerals).
Quite. What I would like to hear from all these gung-ho types, is how we go about producing quantities of a simple 2-core power cable, on Mars, or in the asteroids or the Moon.
Back in the 1980s, some Stanford AI lab people were talking about self-replicating robots on the moon by 2000. I asked "how soon can you do it in Arizona". They didn't like that.
I'd like to see a system that, allowed to order any stock catalog item on Amazon or Digi-Key, could self-replicate.
Look at the history of humankind and the progress that we have made in the last two centuries alone, what other conviction could one have with that in mind?
If we were able to build self-sustaining colonies on Mars, surviving on a nuke-ravaged earth would be easy as pie.
Sure, temperatures would go down (but nowhere near as cold as Mars) and it would be hard to harvest plants, but we would still have fossil fuels to generate electricity for grow rooms, and we would still have earth soils that are ultra-rich in nutrients. The surface would be nowhere near as radioactive, so people could still work outside, allowing mines and so on to keep operating as today.
Overall, while it would be a huge tragedy, kill billions, and destroy our civilization as we know it, it would still leave the Earth as an absolute paradise compared to Mars.
Having your name be immortalized forever in history is something that appeals to a lot of people, especially billionaires who have run out of things to buy.
I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.
Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.