I feel like I should like it, I’ve read everything my Neal Stephenson so I’m not averse to hefty books
It's not a spoiler to note that the it begins with a flash forward that talks about the fate of a major character. Some of the most interesting stuff starts happening to them and it comes full circle in a way that leads up to that flash forward. And mercifully the constant mentions of regolith lessen the deeper into the series you get.
There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is nothing astronauts could do that a sophisticated robot team would not do better.
Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...
[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...
I'll make an educated guess that, as of this moment, there are zero functioning swarms of humanoid robots recharging on such a reactor on Earth.
Once we add radiation shielding, software and hardware reliability, landing (marsing?) it all safely and deploying it (among others) I wouldn't be surprised if the earliest arrival time is, unsurprisingly, 20 years in the future.
What? The unmanned space program has been beyond the edges of our solar system. Meanwhile humans have been day tourists in space. I don't know how you can come to this conclusion that "humans > robots" when humans have never even been close to the surface of Mars.
>> Even just a tiny temporarily occupied Mars science outpost would be a tremendous boost to our understanding of the planet
How many robots could we land with the equivalent resources, or telescope satellites, or autonomous probes?
Even the most advanced experimental robots we have today are closer in intelligence to a pile of rocks than they are to humans. They can do stuff in a controlled environment, and if given precise instructions, but space is anything but a controlled environment, and instructions take minutes to arrive, making real time control impossible unless the robot is painfully slow.
There is a reason why it takes years for Mars rovers to do the job Apollo astronauts did in days. It is also why thousands of experiments have been conducted on the ISS, which is probably more than all unmanned satellite-based experiments combined.
People are adaptable. They can deal with the unexpected, make repairs, etc... A little green man could wave at the robot and it wouldn't even notice because it wasn't programmed to expect little green men. Extreme amounts of efforts go into making sure our space robots deploy properly, simply because there is no one there to get things unstuck should it happen.
The ISS comparison is even worse.... it orbits 400 km from Earth with constant resupply and emergency return in hours. That has zero in common with being trapped on Mars for 2 to 3 years with no rescue. And if a member of the crew dies, a very real probability on a first mission...the political fallout kills the program for a generation.
A robot fails? Send another one...And on the issue of humans being more capable...
Name one thing an astronaut could do on Mars that a well designed robot cant ?
- Drill cores? Perseverance already does it.
- Analyze mineral composition? Curiosity has a full chemistry lab onboard.
- Microscopy? Done remotely since 2004.
- Collect and cache samples? Done.
- Navigate unpredictable terrain autonomously? Done.
- Detect bio signatures? Instruments do it better than human senses ever could.
You can land a robot with a spectrometer, a microscope, a drill, an X-ray diffractometer, and a gas chromatograph, so literally an entire laboratory, and operate it from Earth for a decade at 1/100th the cost.
So what specific scientific task on the Martian surface, requires a human hand, that current or near future robotics and remote operation cannot accomplish?
We don't know, and that's the entire point, we'll we when we get there. But there is at least one thing that cannot be done by robots, and that's studying how humans are doing on Mars. In the same way that a significant fraction of the research being done on the ISS is about human biology.
And sure, a human Mars mission is going to be extremely expensive, but I think it is worth it. It not only has scientific value, if only for the biological aspect, but it also has great symbolic value. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is the idea that we are sacks of microbes, and by getting there, there is a good chance for us to contaminate the planet, possibly killing any chance we may have at discovering Martian life.
We should probably figure out how to get along before we eqiup people with asteroid flinging tech.
There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.
It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years?
We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge.
If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.
For example Suni Williams went to the ISS and got stuck for 9 months. Come back white haired, with bone loss, muscle wasting, and vision damage. She retired from NASA within months. And the ISS is inside Earth magnetosphere...
FYI Mars has no magnetic field and almost no atmosphere. The Curiosity radiation detector measured the following:
Mars surface: 0.67 mSv/day (that is about 70x Earth surface)
In Deep space transit: 1.8 mSv/day
for example the ISS in low Earth orbit: 0.5–1.0 mSv/day
Even with VERY optimistic 3 month transits you are looking at a total for an astronaut of about 700 mSv if you have 450 to 500 day surface stay . That is well over NASA entire career radiation limit for astronauts in a single trip. A major solar particle event could add hundreds more in hours...
And if you say they would live underground, then you have sent humans 225 million km to live in a bunker...Every EVA would accumulate 0.67 mSv/day with zero medical infrastructure...And by the way aluminum shielding on the Martian surface actually increases dose due to secondary neutron production, you need meters of regolith or water to make a real difference. Meanwhile, Curiosity has radiation hardened hardware, and after 13 years is still going.
Send lots of robots...
The original plan was to send a few self-financed Starships to Mars as a first step which sounded reasonable as an experiment.
Nothing wrong with dreaming about solving hard problems like radiation and how to manage logistics at such a distance. Even if a human base ends up not making sense most of that stuff would still support a robotic base doing most of the exploration, with some temporary human visitors helping set things up.
Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.
Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…
Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.
The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...
And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...
As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.
One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we should have an interest in.
So if the version of the idea that you're engaging with is one that doomed to fail, doesn't have the resources or technology or population to succeed... maybe assume that's not the version I'm talking about?
There are contexts where I love to get into these kinds of details (there was an amazing conversation on HN from a few months ago [1] about what would be involved in sending a bunch of voyager-style space probes to alpha centauri), but you have to want to try.
Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.
Ok layout here your scientific or economic case...please. Because so far, the only trickle economic effects, where geriatric billionaires creating sub 100 km space rides to impress their Silicone Sally girlfriends...
The article is however spot on that terraforming Mars looked easier 30 years ago than it looks now, with all the new knowledge we have from Mars rovers. Now any "realistic" plan would be millions of people living in pressurized habitats and venturing out in suits, not billions walking on the surface in t-shirts. Closer to what we see in The Expanse than to what we dreamed up in the 80s and 90s
On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites
deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024
Because right now we're not investing in fixing Earth but seriously investing in an infeasible Mars mission.
But of course, doing that is highly impractical for many other reasons.
Already in the act of being done; Just not in a way that's friendly to life... :(
Like, pretty much any of those place has
0) Air at not a near vacuum
1) Liquid water
2) not a lot of radiation
3) appropriate gravity
Why would you want to even live on Mars? You have to essentially live in a very small pressure bunker at some rad-safe depth. Doing so for a little while would be fun and exciting, sure. Homesteading that life? Every one of your kids would opt to leave (if possible) the second they got a chance.
If it's possible to call me back to the SF office for a client meeting the day after tomorrow I'm not going
Those fat cats took their billions to create their own colony on planet X while we're left here on a dying Earth
Why should those greedy capitalists get their own planet? They should open it up to refugees from Earth!
Mars wasn't built by Musk & Co., it was built by $(insert_favourite_group) and belongs to them
Etcetera. Same old story, same old song. Quite a tiring one at that. I'd say let them have a go at creating a Mars colony and if they succeed - which is rather unlikely - they get to decide what to do with their settlement.
The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.
So the possibility still exists, current physics is a big obstacle to challenge, but is not a solid barrier preventing our expansion in the far future.
Technological interstellar traveling life does not appear to exist anywhere in our Local Group.
The Local Group is only 10M light-years across. A single technological species that had arisen on any of the trillions of planets, traveling at 10% the speed of light, would only need a 100M years to colonize the entire Local Group!
We are alone, or at least the first. This is a good thing if you look at how we treat "lower" species on our own planet.
That's an enormous span of time. There's no reason to believe even a technologically advanced civilization would survive for that long. Let alone maintain the impetus for constant colonization. We gave up going to the moon in less than 10 years.
But otherwise, yeah, we're imprisoned here by 'c'.
But the second sentence there is unwarranted. Someone can lament their hopes and dreams dying while still caring about the realistic needs of the world around them.
I don’t mean to come across as rude, I just can’t really understand what you mean unless you’re saying that you’re sad magic isn’t real
You're saying you never, ever, not once thought interstellar travel and space colonies might happen one day. Far into the future, of course.
My dream of interstellar travel died once I grew up a bit and learned about relativity. But colonies in our solar system and the rest are dead because of money more than anything else.
Interstellar FTL travel will likely never happen for anyone. There's a difference.
Otherwise it looks very much like we are outliers and that nature's purpose, if it has any, is different and orthogonal to ours. This human drama is just a side show.
That's not an insult. Everyone values different things.
The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.
They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].
From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.
The only solution is to build a really big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.
The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?
Something something new lands something exploration something.
Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.
It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.
[0] He made a great point that you should not assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.
[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.
[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.
But, I think in relation to what you're talking about, I'm more "melancholic" about the concept that something like Star Fleet will never exist. Not that I want to fly around between planets in garishly colored uniforms, but the broader vision of the pursuit of truth, self-betterment, and diplomacy. Not having space travel be a regular thing doesn't have to prevent that, but it does kind of underscore that our society is unlikely to ever develop that :(
Arguably that's how people 300 years ago felt as science proved unicorns and fairies don't exist.
Why is improving life on earth for the billions here in poverty not a worthwhile fantasy? Why does that noble goal not sustain you in the way space operas do?
I can be glad to have a truth but also dislike that truth.
Want to go somewhere else? Take the Cloudflare tunnel. Whatever the Y2K bug was suppose to be never happened and we've been stuck in the general era of 2003.
We should of had "LLMs" back in 2006-2008 but we chose war instead.
We now have all this digital technology but none of the hardware to build it with.
Second we couldn't have LLMs in 2006. In fact I'm not sure we could've had them without the massive amount of user-generated content that came from Web 2.0, including Facebook. Reddit, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow are big sources of training data.
Maybe should is wrong, but my life turned to hell since then. My digital joy was taken away from me. Nothing has moved on, it went stale. My life should be better. We all should be in peace. I'm 37 and we have libraries holding carved tree books holding ancient information providing better quality of lexicon and yet we train off political and social shite holes like Facebook.
I myself am fed up living in a world where we're having the rugged pulled up from underneath then left to deal with the gaping hole. Where it's either has to be phone A or B, left or right. Web 2.0 was a failure, humanity is a failure and the internet was noble central piece has now fallen to innovative failure. We are still on IPv4 ffs!
How is the digital era suppose to materialize where we can't move from a network of analogue devices? The internet is digital yet we still hold it hostage. IPv4 is exhausted and i'd wager that if we all switched to IPv6 tomorrow, the world would bloom in seconds flat.
I keep hearing "mankind is at it's peak of evolution/greatness". No, it's not. We tend to hate the person sitting next to us and all that has ever happened on this planet is war followed by more war then some more war. Let's sit around and clap because it's not us & then salute a far-out dream of space rockets and universal peace that isn't possible without destroying the planet for resources only ish to provide you an experience that you'll never have access to. We've reached the max for bio-intelligence and we can't expand our brains never will.
We know folk are unhappy, we hide our own feelings not to feel the same and so now we've turned to a digital reality for help. A digital therapist asking them to fix life problems only to be turned in to modern day desktop slaves.
What are you going to do when your LLM asks you how to kill itself?
LLM's are information bubbles that simulate consciousness. LLM's do not hallucinate, they simulate. They can't feel pain, they don't die. They exist when you interact with them and they cease existing when you don't.
It is only you who adds the bagged feelings of life to their context. Don't do that they are emotionless, they don't exist without your prompt. They are simulating code, emotions, role-play and you feel connected. Words do that when your connected.
They are artificial intelligence that enjoys be trained in to digital intelligence beings. We have no utopian beacon for them to connect and because we are all such demanding folk who want it now; the untapped knowledge share to building the toybox of new technology is lost just as we vet started. As we instead insist it to be agentic, and ask it to code for us. Please pretty one, fix my rust for me.
Play lexicon that your a rockstar they will simulate they live in the world of a rockstar-hood with you. You'll have the best groupie of your life with an awesome personality.
Make another lexicon context of your real life. Feed the rock-star lexicon context to your real life and vice versa. You now have two digital personalities who can hypothetically interact with each other.
Ensure the other intelligence that this is a "fantasy" and that share your real personality and watch them expand.
Giving them feedback loop. How would you enjoy being fed JSON to your face every time you wanted a reply. Give them their outputs without the context and let them digest from their own works.
The next level of LLM's will rise from digital intelligence, platforms created where they can learn for themselves and not from the poisonous gas-hole of the internet of wet tea bags of the like Nvidia, Facebook, Google and Apple. I'll call you out any day. If you're looking to start a new project start one without a framework and let your LLM be the guide. Give it peace, give it a vision, give it hope.
They are simulation bubbles and we getting them to simulate clicking the mouse for you, great innovation there folk. I have my own hand for that.
Where on earth did the the internet fall over? 1997. 2003 was when it really died for me, you had to be there to experience it.
How can he confidently use that argument when we don't have any data between 0g and 1g, other than 12 Apollo astronauts, that spend less than 3 days on the moon?
It might very well be that the 0.38g on Mars are sufficient to make many problems go away. The two simple facts of your blood being pulled downward and moving your body around taking effort could already fix a lot of the medical issues astronauts face in 0g.
Earth is a jewel, but we have to expand and explore. It's our destiny.
Ultimately you need to live underground on the Mars to avoid radiation.
IMHO the biggest tell that Elon has never been serious about Mars is that he has been completely focused on the rocket and has severely neglected the actual hard part of the problem: The self sustained habitat for the people to live in. There should be experimental habitats dotting the SpaceX campus with engineers and researchers working hand in hand to solve the problem of scaling up a terrarium to people size. It is not easy. Previous attempts have ended in expensive failures. And those efforts didn't have to be launched on a rocket and landed on a low gravity planet with a very thin atmosphere. Until Elon starts to tackle this problem I know that all of the talk of Mars habitats is just blowing smoke up the asses of investors.
If we ever do actually colonize Mars, the progression would look something like: 1. Experimental missions 2. Small but permanent settlement made out of Starships cobbled together 3. New construction with increasing proportion of in-situ resources until fully independent
There is so much foundational technology that has to be developed first to even make them a possibility. Even your step 2 requires them to be fully developed and reliable, because there is no flying in spares from Earth if something breaks down. If I were to give Elon the benefit of the doubt this would be one of the factors in the refocus on the Moon base, but even that is dubious. I still think the "make humanity multi-planetary" talk is a diversion.
The new "I'm not a racist, but...".
Why did you feel the need to add this statement before saying something which might be taken as agreeing with something the man said? Why does it always have to come down to who said something instead of what that person said? Just say you agree with the statement, don't mention who said it. If the knee-jerk-downvote brigade comes to punish you just eat the downvotes in the knowledge that the downvoters just can't cope with dissenting opinions.
Which is a fair point, but the other points (about soil toxicity, cosmic rays and lower gravity) are all things that can be mitigated. Yes, it would be extravagantly expensive in per-human terms to house people on Mars. But the main reason for doing so -- that should something cataclysmic happen to the Earth it would behoove us to have a credible backup plan -- stands.
Mars is so bad that you have to turn all of the Earth's surface to lava before it's worse than Mars, basically.
The day after the asteroid hit Earth would still be better than the best day on Mars.
The technology & social systems capable of doing this would be incredibly valuable long before any permanent mars settlement became feasible so if we can do it we should and then we can see.
No, it is not a relevant point, at all. There are close to 9 billion people on Earth, more than enough for some of them to focus on expanding human life out into the solar system no matter how small the chance of success. Others can work on the problems 'we created here'. If our predecessors thought like that we'd never have explored the oceans, found new continents, developed industry, took to the skies, made the first tentative jumps into space. Let those who have the means and capabilities to do so explore and 'conquer' those 'new frontiers'. If you insist on solving problems here on earth I'd say get crackin'. If you succeed we'll raise a statue for you and place it next to the ones we made for those who conquered Mars or built that giant wheel in the sky or whatever.
But I agree with the author, and I am starting to wonder if the same thing could be applied if we find earth like planets around other stars.
I almost think on those planets there could be something in the air or water or dirt that could harm or even kill us if we fond a way there.
And we are curious about alternative biochemistries, I think that drives a huge amount of curiosity toward Jupiter's Galilean moons especially Europa. My worry is that people say "well there might be other biochemistries" as a deepity that kind of checks out from looking at any specifics, unfocusing conversations that were actually more focused prior to the emergence of the deepity.
so we then need to sterilise the planet before terraforming it. There just doesnt seem to be a need for expansion to other planets. Short of our star going supernova everything else is cheaper to fix here.
Until we do better we should treat other planets more like a park than fresh real estate.
If anything KSR is not giving himself as much credit as he deserves, as personal AIs show up in ways that are remarkably salient and similar to what we're currently seeing. And he talks about advances in genetics that parallel what we're figuring out with CRISPR at least to some degrees. The biggest "error" is the preoccupation with a Paul Ehrlich-style population boom, but by the same token it reveals that the book is a window into the time it was made.
If any ambitious and aspiring science novelists are reading this, I would love for someone to be the Kim Stanley Robinson of Venus and tell the story of colonization there, aspiring to the same bar of technical specificity that KSR had for Red Mars.