He had told a TED2022 Conference audience that he was motivated to acquire Twitter, now renamed X, to turn it into a platform for free speech across the planet. He talked about it as being a public commons, an open town hall where ideas could be shared and discussed.
Unless you have attended public town halls which I have from my past work with government representatives, you don’t know how quickly they can descend into chaos. An individual with a beef can take over a town hall discussion and destroy the meeting of minds and public harmony in short order.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Musk has beefs and has now become not just the town crier, but also the dissenter who shows up to comment and post on the site. To make things worse Musk has invited back a bunch of dissenters who spout extremist conspiracy theories, or content that was previously banned on the site.
It is hard to fathom why Musk has chosen this path for X which is not paying for itself and losing subscribers and advertisers. Maybe the simplest explanation is the right one. Maybe it is just about a man with a giant ego and too much money to burn.
I have admired Musk for his vision regarding electric vehicles (EVs) and how their adoption can help the planet end its addiction to fossil fuels. I equally endorse the work at SpaceX to make rockets reusable to drive down the cost of getting to space. The Starlink satellite network is today making the Internet accessible to more people on Earth than at any time previously. It is truly raising all boats and has attracted copycats like Jeff Bezos who has begun to belatedly launch Kuiper, a competitor.
NASA has become reliant on SpaceX in ways no one a decade ago would have predicted. SpaceX ferries crews to the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX resupply and return Dragon capsules bring work being done on the ISS back to Earth, something no other suppliers can do.
Tesla EVs have been the key disrupters of the automobile industry with the traditional dominant companies in this sector rapidly altering plans to move from internal combustion engine vehicles to ones running on electric batteries.
In a headline article that appeared on the Huffington Post online news site yesterday, it reads “Elon Musk Calls Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory ‘The Actual Truth.'” There is little to admire about Twitter’s evolution to X under Musk’s ownership. Before it was X, Twitter content was moderated to remove hate speech. But today, X disseminates hatred, racism, and anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish propaganda. In the defence of free speech on the platform, Musk appears to be siding with these new truths about race and religion and endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories. So much for creating a public town hall where ideas get discussed in an environment where civil discourse is respected.
]]>At a recent Edison Electric Institute (EEI) conference, keynote speakers Bill Gates and Elon Musk described their visions of mass electrification. With today’s energy demands being met by a combination of electricity from renewable and non-renewable sources, and the balance coming from fossil fuels for industrial and heating uses, Musk told the conference attendees that only a tripling of sustainable electricity will produce a successful low-carbon future.
Musk has called for adding renewable energy sources en masse to the grid, more electric vehicles, heat pumps in buildings and homes, and hydrogen used in manufacturing and for airplanes and ships. This he calls the future of a “sustainable energy civilization.” To back up renewable energy he envisions increasing the world’s energy storage capacity by 240 Terrawatt-hours (Twhs) just for the United States alone.
Bill Gates also sees a very different grid from the one presently in place. Gates has been writing about modernizing the power grid, noting that most of the current transmission and distribution infrastructure dates back to the 1950s to 1970s. He describes the current state of the grid as being past its 50-year best-before date. He also notes that the grid’s power sources in the current model are located far away from where optimal renewable energy capacity exists. The places where the sun shines the most and where the winds blow best are not where the majority of nuclear, thermal, and hydroelectric power stations exist today.
Gates has been investing in next-generation power projects including nuclear reactors of both the fission and fusion type. One of his pet projects is TerraPower’s Natrium demonstration project in Wyoming which is expected to begin operating in 2030.
His Breakthrough Energy Fund is backing fusion power demonstration plants and envisions many fusion reactors being built that will feed electricity to grids across the planet for the next 10 million years.
Gates used different numbers than Musk in his EEI discussion. He forecasted global electrical power generation capacity to grow from 6 to 20 Twhs to bring the entire planet on a level playing field with the Western countries of the Global North. The difference in capacity forecasts between the two is that Musk only was talking about energy storage which needs to exceed the total sum of power generation capacity.
What the two didn’t talk about which surprised me, particularly referring to Musk, was the potential to generate energy from space that could either feed into future grids or bypass them entirely in a fully distributed model should the current work being done at Caltech succeed.
Space-based solar arrays that convert electricity to microwaves or lasers connected to on-the-ground receivers feeding the grid is one technology option. The other would be a point-to-point technology that uses a constellation of small solar power-generating satellites forming a mesh space power delivery system converting light energy to microwaves to connect directly to receivers in homes and businesses. This would resemble the current Starlink telecommunications network that uses a constellation of satellites to provide global telephone and data feeds.
A point-to-point system would bypass power grids which would only be needed for backup. This could reduce the need for an enormous ramp-up of grid infrastructure and would serve to democratize energy for all on the planet.
]]>So when Elon Musk sketched his idea to scale up the pneumatic tube concept and turn it into an alternative to high-speed trains as a transportation system that would operate in a similar fashion to these old pneumatic tube systems, despite skepticism, the idea wasn’t so farfetched. Musk soon launched The Boring Company which has been working on it since and turning it into reality. And he isn’t alone. Another tech billionaire, Sir Richard Branson, of Virgin Galactic, and now Virgin Hyperloop, has worked on a competitive high-speed, ground-based transportation system that demonstrated a test passenger pod in 2020.
A new company with French-Italian and Canadian roots, founded in 2015, with offices in Toronto, and Limoges, France, has also entered the hyperloop market with plans to build a transportation line connecting the cities of Calgary and Edmonton, in Canada’s Province of Alberta. Called TransPod, the company recently closed on $688 million CDN in financing for this project, a hyperloop that will carry both passengers and freight between the two cities which lie 279 kilometres (174.7 miles) apart.
What today is a 3-hour road trip by automobile, or a 20-minute flight not counting travelling to the airport and from it, boarding and deplaning, will now be less than a 20-minute ride.
In a YouTube video, TransPod describes its technology as going beyond the “traditional hyperloop concept.” I love the notion the company thinks that the word traditional can be applied to a hyperloop. And if you compare the TransPod design with Virgin’s test vehicle, (see below) maybe the claim is justifiable.
TransPod is described as a plane without wings. Each pod will travel at speeds exceeding 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) per hour and will operate carbon-emission free. Pods on the line will depart every two minutes just like a subway commuter train. Passenger capacity in the current design configuration is 27 per pod with an extended version holding up to 50. Freight capacity is 10 metric tons. The passenger experience will involve arriving at the station, buying a ticket, and waiting at the appropriate boarding platform for the next TransPod to arrive. It’s that simple.
The propulsion system is powered by a linear induction motor. Air is diverted to flow from the front of each TransPod out the back using an axial compressor. The TransPod glides on a levitation system that minimizes friction. While inside the cabin, passengers travel in a temperature and pressure-regulated environment with comfortable seating and all the amenities you normally would find in business class on an aircraft. The interior lighting creates the feeling of daylight with a continuous side-window display showing passing scenery. And when you travel on a TransPod, after the first time, all personal comfort preferences get saved in the system for the next trip.
Work on the Edmonton to Calgary line is to begin in 2025. A high-speed test track is planned before the final construction of what is seen as the future of sustainable, low-emission ground transportation in the 21st century.
]]>Listening to the post-conference and news coverage of these two billionaires waxing poetic about the experience left me searching for the meaning of it all. Branson and Bezos both claimed that what they had achieved was the first step in the commercialization of space, making it more accessible for the average Joe in the near future. But that is hardly the case. To me, the two fulfilled boyhood dreams with billionaire dollars.
They did Disney-like rides to the edge of space. No more. And now millionaires and billionaires with more money than they know what to do with can sign up for the same joyride to experience 3 to 4 minutes of weightlessness.
For the rest of us, we can have a similar near weightless experience by going swimming or riding a swing. How so?
With swimming, we don’t quite achieve zero gravity, but there is a reason NASA astronauts prepare for long-duration space missions by practicing in a neutral buoyancy tank, the largest and deepest swimming pool in the world. It’s the closest thing to microgravity humans can experience for an extended period of time.
With a swing, we get a glimpse of microgravity when centripetal acceleration at the top of the arc equals the acceleration of gravity creating a temporary microsecond of weightlessness when our bodies are aligned at 180 degrees parallel to the ground.
Branson and Bezos, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other commercial space companies are all singing a tune from the same hymnal. Commercializing space is inevitable with our species achieving new conquests off our planet.
First, it will be in near-Earth space which we will occupy with commercially operated space stations for companies to do research and development in microgravity.
Then there will be space hotels where well-heeled consumers will “enjoy” a week or more confined to a space in outer space smaller than a studio apartment here on Earth.
From there we will expect ventures to move out to larger habitats located at Lagrange points in deeper space with great views of our entire planet and accommodations more suited to millionaires and billionaires and their lifestyles.
And of course, the dream includes habitats and space commercial ventures which within decades may be established on the Moon, and within another lifetime on Mars and beyond to the Asteroid Belt.
The driving forces behind this future, state Branson, Bezos, Musk and others, are the pursuit of commerce and satisfying our human curiosity. But the reality is these ambitions are being driven by boyhood fascinations with the science fiction of Buck Rogers and Star Trek.
So will the three amigo billionaires be the driving force behind the human conquest of the Solar System? The true reason for going to space is best captured by Branson who told the BBC after the Virgin Galactic flight, “I’ve wanted to go to space since I was a kid, and I want to enable hopefully hundreds of thousands of other people over the next 100 years to be able to go to space.”
Bezos’ vision is more complex. He described it to Anderson Cooper in a post-flight interview, where he talked about a future where heavy polluting industries migrate off Earth to space and exploit resources harvested from low-gravity-well sources like the Moon and asteroids, allowing Earth below to return to an Eden-like garden for humanity and the rest of life to enjoy.
Musk’s vision is existential but also seems caught up in childhood fantasy. I am sure, like most young boys, Musk was fascinated by dinosaurs. I certainly was and still am. Their catastrophic ending has captivated audiences from young to old for years. Musk sees us ending the same way the dinosaurs did. He wants to avoid that and as a result has been building SpaceX with a goal to put a city on Mars by mid-century, making humanity a multiplanetary species, and ensuring our survival should a catastrophe strike. This catastrophist vision of the future is his driving force which seems somewhat childish if not adolescent.
I understand Branson. Space is appealing to the inner child in him. Bezos’ Edenesque vision seems almost childishly naive. And Musk sees humanity’s end, like the dinosaurs as the existential crisis that space can solve. I would argue that if Musk wants to avoid catastrophe for humanity, that climate change be his principal focus. Because wouldn’t it be more useful to our planet and its future to see many of those billions of dollars these gentlemen are spending on suborbital space flights and pursuits of a city on Mars, on solutions to reverse global warming so that they can leave a legacy for the children of today and their future children that will be better than the one we currently are creating?
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On the XPrize website it describes the problem in stark terms:
“The world’s leading scientists estimate that we may need to remove as much as 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2030, and 10 gigatons per year by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change. For humanity to reach the Paris Agreements goal of limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to no more than 1.5˚(C) of pre-industrial levels, or even 2˚(C), we need bold, radical tech innovation and scale up that goes beyond limiting CO2 emissions, but actually removes CO2 already in the air and oceans. If humanity continues on a business-as-usual path, the global average temperature could increase 6˚(C) by the year 2100.”
Entrants have four years to demonstrate their carbon-negative solutions whether coming from nature, or through the application of technology. The competition guidelines are to be announced on Earth Day, April 22, 2021, with the closing date for submissions four years hence on Earth Day 2025.
To win the demonstrated solution must be scalable to 10 Gigatons per year CO2 removal by 2050. The initial demonstration should be capable of removing a ton daily. Cost per ton for removal will be one consideration by the judges in determining the winner. Another will be the length of time the CO2 will remain sequestered with a minimum goal of 100 years.
Winnings will be distributed as follows:
CO2 isn’t the only greenhouse gas that contributes to atmospheric warming. After all methane, water vapour, nitrous, and sulfur dioxide are other contributors that raise the global temperature. Methane, for example, is far more destructive but short-lived. Methane spikes have recently been noted as pushing up the atmosphere’s temperature albeit temporarily. That is not the cae for CO2 which lingers in the atmosphere for multiple millennia if not absorbed by natural sequestering processes such as the ocean, land, carbonate rocks, and plants.
Capturing CO2 by technological means is seen by many in the academic community as a fast way to help nature bring carbon in the atmosphere into balance at levels that don’t cause global temperatures to rise to a point that threatens our existence.
Capturing CO2 from industrial sources at the emission point is viable today. Scrubbers added to smokestacks, an older technology has been used to filter out smog-causing nitrous and sulfur dioxides from coal-fired thermal power plants. But adding CO2 extraction to scrubbers is something already happening. One such facility is located near Estevan, Saskatchewan, which has been operating a working carbon capture technology since 2014 at the SaskPower Boundary Dam coal-fired power station. This system has the potential to capture up to one million tons of CO2 when operating at full capacity. It works using solvents added to the smokestack scrubbers which capture the CO2. The gas is then compressed and pumped through pipelines into a stable sandstone formation 3.4 kilometers (2.1 miles) underground.
Another carbon capture working example is Quest, a Royal Dutch Shell project attached to an Athabasca Oil Sands Project near Edmonton, Alberta. Quest has the capacity to capture and store one million tons of CO2 annually. It captures the gas from upgrader operations and then compresses it before injecting into an underground saline reservoir two kilometers (1.25 miles) below the surface.
Then there is Carbon Engineering whose technology usees giant fans to draw in surrounding air which passes over thin plastic membranes coated with a non-toxic potassium hydroxide solution which chemically binds with the CO2 turning it into a carbonate salt. Additional chemical processes separate the salt from the solution which is then recycled. The salt is pelletized and heated to release the CO2 back into a gas which is then compressed and either piped underground or sent to industrial application users.
It will be interesting to see if the designers of these three projects enter the XPrize contest.
But wait. The Musk XPrize isn’t the only one aimed at extracting CO2. The NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize which was launched in 2015 is just coming to an end. This four-and-a-half-year competition has three Canadian entries among the 10 finalists. Submissions were due in December 2020. Each of the finalists received a share of a $5 million milestone prize. The grand prize involves two industrial streams: one focused on extracting CO2 from coal-fired power plants, and the second from natural-gas power plants. The CO2 extracted must be converted into products such as carbon fiber, or carbon-infused concrete. Each of the two grand prizes, is worth $7.5 million. We should hear from the judges shortly.
What makes this latest carbon capture XPrize stand out is the amount that Musk is offering the winners. No previous XPrize has reached a $100 million plateau. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that if it were to happen it would be something involving Elon Musk who takes big risks, and makes grand promises, and delivers.
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On the weekend Musk invited the press to a presentation in Cameron County, Texas, where the company has its space research and development hub, and a likely future spaceport. A Starship prototype designated the Mk1 could be seen behind Musk positioned next to SpaceX’s first successful rocket, the Falcon 1, as the commercial space pioneer reviewed the company’s accomplishments and plans.
Standing 50-meters tall (164 feet), the Mk1 is one of two prototype Starships being built by SpaceX. The second, the Mk2, is being built in parallel at SpaceX’s facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The competition between the two SpaceX teams is designed to improve the pace of rapid prototyping and yield design efficiencies learned from both build experiences.
Sometime before the end of this year Musk told the crowd that the Mk1 will fly to a height of 20 kilometers (over 65,000 feet) before returning to its Cameron County base in a soft landing. The Mk2 will also undergo similar flight tests out of the company’s Florida base. One expects further iterations of these test Starships before SpaceX will attempt to launch a Starship into orbit and return it to Earth.
Powering both prototypes is the Raptor engine, a methane-fueled technology developed by SpaceX. The company is building an inventory of these Raptor engines completing one every 8 to 10 days because it intends to build a lot of Starships. Each Mk1 and Mk2 will deploy 3 Raptor engines. The finished Starship will be powered by 6. And the yet-to-be-built Extreme Heavy, the reusable booster rocket to launch Starships to Deep Space will be powered by as many as 37. Every element of these SpaceX rockets will be reusable, a feature that has catapulted the company into becoming a prime launch platform for multiple national space agencies including NASA, and a number of private companies, all attracted to the reduced launch costs associated with this feature.
So how close is SpaceX to its dream of putting spacefarers on the surface of the Moon and Mars?
Musk talks about meeting both objectives in the 2020s on a timetable far more aggressive than that of NASA, ESA, Roscosmos or CNSA, the latter the acronym for China’s space agency. Is there something that these national agencies know that they are not sharing with SpaceX?
The missing ingredient in the Musk equation to get to the Moon and Mars and stay there is the human dimension. How will spacefarers be sulf-sustaining for a prolonged period beyond low-Earth orbit?
The only long-term experience we have in human habitability in space is the International Space Station (ISS) which orbits 408 kilometers (over 250 miles) above the Earth. Technically, ISS hasn’t even left the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. And certainly the ISS is well inside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, the Van Allen Belt. So the current crew of 9 onboard ISS at present is largely being shielded from the potential lethality of solar and cosmic radiation. Then there is the issue of provisioning ISS with supplies of oxygen, water, food, and replacement parts for onboard things that break. ISS has an umbilical cord of supply ships that regularly bring it life’s necessities. They are just a few hours to a day away.
Musk’s Starship, however, plans to take human travelers well away from that umbilical. A Starships voyage will mean exposure to the extreme environment of space. it will mean self-sufficiency for the duration of voyages to and from the Moon and Mars taking from days to months each way. Starships will need closed-cycle environmental systems that supply the entire needs of the humans on board. And once at the Moon or Mars will need the means to manufacture fuel and oxidizer for a return to Earth in addition to providing life support. Musk on the weekend admitted that lots more work is needed before planting a base on the Moon, and an eventual human colony on Mars. But he is making many of us dream about a reality that he believes will happen far sooner than the timelines presented by the world’s national space agencies.
SpaceX wants to ensure that its design is airworthy on flight re-entry and landing. That means composite materials used to build the BFS have to undergo stress testing. The heat shield materials and structure also need to be thoroughly tested. The upper stage of SpaceX existing Falcon 9, therefore, will be redesigned for these tests. The test miniature versions of the BFS will be non-propulsive on re-entry with plans for supersonic de-orbit maneuvers and test landings at a site in South Texas.
Just when will these test flights start? Speculation says sometime before 2020. That will allow SpaceX to work out any design flaws for a planned mid-2020s human-crewed flight to Mars.
One should read this announcement in the context that so many of SpaceX’s milestone deadlines have moved back from the beginning of its first efforts to build a reusable rocket system. And many announced initiatives have fallen by the wayside over the years as SpaceX has come up against engineering and financial realities.
The news of this interim plan comes from Elon Musk in a series of November 7 Twitter feeds. Musk optimistically predicts that a first orbital test will happen by next June. In a further Tweet, Musk explains in an answer to one of his followers why the test landings over South Texas will be non-propulsive. The obvious reason is differences in density, composition, and angle of entry to the Earth’s atmosphere as compared to what will be needed for Mars. He further comments that SpaceX already has a good handle on propulsive landings.
SpaceX is putting all of its resources and rocket wizardry behind the development of the BFR and BFS. Musk wants to establish a large human presence on Mars before the end of this century because he is convinced humanity on this planet needs an option should an extinction event happen here. The BFR and BFS is his vision of how to make this happen by ferrying as many as 100 or more passengers at a time to the Red Planet.
There is no discussion about what happens should we discover native life on Mars and the implications that would have on any human colonization of the planet including some of Musk’s ideas for terraforming it to make it more suitable for habitation.
The BFR and BFS, however, have a number of Earth-bound uses as Musk has explained. The system would replace Falcon 9 as the company’s primary space launch system for orbital missions, and would also serve as a sub-orbital commuter spaceliner capable of sending people around the world faster than any existing form of travel today. For example, a BFS could offer a passenger service for commuters between New York City and Tokyo taking less than 45 minutes on one-way flight. Musk has imagined an entire spaceport infrastructure for his Earth-based commuter service with multiple launches per day because of the reusability and quick turnaround capability of the systems his company is designing.
Of course, currently, we know that the current Falcon 9, Block 5 configuration has successfully flown two missions back to back without extensive refitting. A third mission will represent the next leap in reusability getting us one step closer to Musk’s goal.
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Because our own human activity here on Earth shows just how hard it is to do. We have been geoengineering Earth over the last 150 years because of the Industrial Revolution. With all that burning of carbon-based materials we have altered Earth but in geological terms, one would not describe it as substantial.
What we humans have done is raise global mean temperatures by nearly 0.8 Celsius (1.44 Fahrenheit) degrees. The consequences of our current carbon consumption mean that temperatures will continue to rise for the foreseeable future (many centuries) with other physical planet-wide effects including sea level rise, changes to ocean and atmospheric temperatures, altered wind and precipitation patterns, and increased extreme weather events. Ultimately the planet’s biology will be stressed, unlike anything we humans have witnessed since the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution over 12,000 years ago.
Speaking of that last number, nature’s ability to do geoengineering works on time scales where 12,000 is akin to a nanosecond in geological time. Our planet is more than 4.5 billion years old. During its lifetime it has been re-engineered numerous times from birth as an aggregated mass of proto-planetary materials to being heated to a molten state, to the moment when crustal plates formed moved along by the hot mantle conveyor belt beneath, then to several prolonged ice ages where Earth turned into an ice ball, and now to the present world we know.
So what makes people like Elon Musk believe we humans can do to Mars what geological time has not accomplished? Pure fantasy in my opinion.
Today Mars is a perpetually dry and cold place. It has a tenuous atmosphere that is thinner by a factor of ten than the air at the top of Mount Everest here on Earth. The atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide (CO2). Any water on Mars is either locked up in the ice caps along with dry ice (frozen CO2) at its poles, or in subsurface formations that at best are in a briny liquid state (see the recent findings described in a previous posting at this site) or permanently frozen. To add to this Mars has no planetary magnetic field to shield it from cosmic and solar radiation. So all in all, this is an inhospitable environment except for well designed robotic landers and rovers, or in the future, humans encapsulated in protected habitats largely dug-in beneath the surface.
Geoengineering Mars in what science fiction has called terraforming would require humans to alter the planet to make it suitable for terrestrial life. In an article just published in Nature Astronomy, authors Bruce Jakosky, University of Colorado Boulder, and Christopher Edwards, Northern Arizona University, describe the work of other authors on this subject before stating the whys and wherefores that make the notion of terraforming impossible.
Among the tasks we humans would have to do on Mars includes the following:
Increasing the air pressure is beyond any current technical capability of we humans to do on any large scale. Yes, we could set up a number of highly polluting smokestack-based industrial plants on Mars to churn out tons of greenhouse gases. But we would have to do this for many centuries to begin to increase the air pressure to approximate conditions on Earth at 5,000 meters (over 16,400 feet) above sea level. Even then we would have to continuously run these polluting sites to deal with the fact that Mars would lose a significant amount of these gases to space in the process because of the lack of a magnetic field. We’ve had lots of experience with smokestack pollution on Earth but building such an infrastructure on Mars with little in the way of free oxygen present would be extremely expensive.
Another could involve releasing the water vapour (another greenhouse gas) stored in the subterranean ice found at many locales on the planet. We would want to ensure that a significant amount of water vapour got released at the beginning of the operation. Elon Musk has suggested a thermonuclear detonation as one means of water release. His idea is to set off a big bomb over a large block of subterranean ice and watch it vaporize. But the pressure gained would be only temporary for the same reasons other greenhouse gases, when released through the smokestack option, would over time vanish. And there is no assurance that released water vapour would condense to become stable liquid water on the surface. It would more than likely in a very short time be lost to space because of ultraviolet light bombardment (no magnetic field to stop this) and the exposure of the atmosphere’s edge to the solar wind. The Maven orbiter has been measuring this phenomenon on Mars showing that the current atmosphere continues to lose CO2 and ionized oxygen split from the carbon into space.
Another idea as explored by Jakosky and Edwards would be to release CO2 from the planet’s carbon sinks including the dry ice, water ice fields found at the poles, carbon-bearing minerals at or below the surface. But that means finding those minerals which so far based on orbiters, landers, and rovers, seem to be sparsely spread. Analysis of atmospheric dust holds little hope for finding anything more significant in this regard.
In any terraforming scenario, we humans would have to release enough carbon in the form of CO2 to be of such volume as to increase the current atmosphere’s carbon content by a factor of 167. That’s because today’s Martian atmosphere has an atmospheric pressure on the surface of 6 millibars, equivalent to about 15 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter. Liquid water would need surface pressures to be 1 bar with an atmosphere containing about 2,500 grams of CO2 per cubic centimeter.
In Jakosky and Edwards’ paper there is little discussion on methane (CH4) emanations which have been detected seasonally coming from the Martian surface. CH4 is a potent greenhouse gas of higher density than CO2. But it, too, would over time be lost to space or would degrade into carbon and hydrogen isotopes with the hydrogen quickly escaping.
Jakosky and Edwards in their conclusions stated: “there is not enough CO2 left on Mars in any known, readily accessible reservoir, if mobilized and emplaced into the atmosphere, to produce any significant increase in temperature or pressure.” They go on to state that large-scale processing of CO2 from the surface would have to be on a planet-wide scale, well beyond any present human technology. And finally, they have no solution to the outgassing to space of anything we humans would add to the Martian atmosphere that soon wouldn’t be lost.
But Elon Musk disagrees going back to the idea of using a thermonuclear explosion to release massive amounts of CO2 in the Martian soil. Musk believes that Mars, of all the planets in the Solar System, is the best option to terraform. He thinks humans can come up with technical solutions to the lack of a natural magnetic field. He believes that plants would grow on the Martian surface if atmospheric pressures using the trapped CO2 were released. Among Musk’s idea for heating up Mars is the notion of creating artificial pulsing suns above the poles to heat up the planet.
Musk is convinced that Mars must be colonized by humans to give us a multi-planetary foundation in the event that life should end here on Earth. He has and will continue to plan for getting to Mars early in the 2020s, first with two supply ships to land in 2022 followed by four spaceships with humans aboard to arrive in 2024. The Mars they will come to will remain inhospitable for life as we know it. With certainty, life that accompanies us to Mars in the form of bacteria will threaten microbial native life that may already be there. But no one seems to be talking about the implications of Martian colonization in the face of an already living planet. Our arrival would be equated with an extinction event for the Red Planet’s own ecology.
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Only the Viking landers were equipped with experiments designed to sniff out potential evidence of life signatures in samples dug from the Martian regolith. The results of the tests, when aired in the press in 1976 stated that life had not been discovered. But in April of 2012, a revisit of the data collected from Viking’s two landers and their Label Release Experiment measuring the gases emitted by soil samples heated to 160 Celsius (320 Fahrenheit) degrees, overturned that assessment.
The results, published in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences (IASS) stated there was 99% certainty that microbial life exists on Mars. Unequivocally the results the investigators reported were not caused by any Earth-borne contaminants arriving on the landers but were unique to Mars. The results were also consistent with similar tests run on Earth in Antarctica with conditions resembling the extremes of cold and dryness found on the Red Planet. Since Viking, NASA has sent many landers and probes to Mars including Opportunity and Curiosity (the latest), but strangely the agency has never tried a Viking retest or included more advanced life detection experiments, a surprising oversight by the agency. Instead, we have looked for organic molecules, the presence of water today, and evidence of significant surface water in the Marian past. And we have found all three.
The Mars 2020 lander, which will be the successor to Curiosity, doesn’t include any onboard life detection experiments in its current configuration. One wonders why not? Is NASA deliberately avoiding the question of life on Mars? And if so, why?
There could be several reasons.
One is religious. If life is not unique to Earth then the creation myths of the world’s major faiths are called into question.
The second is the ethical dilemma that Mars presents. An inhabited Mars, even if only microorganisms, is not something to be trampled upon and suborned by alien life brought to the planet by humanity. That would be a criminal act.
The third reason is the profound implications of finding Martian life in a world seemingly inhospitable to it, and what that could mean for other places in the Solar System and beyond where conditions seem equally if not more inhospitable.
Here are just a few relatively nearby examples:
Planetary scientists today note that Titan bears similarities to Earth with liquid both on the surface and in its thick atmosphere, that falls as rain and flows through river valleys into lakes and seas. But there are differences as well. It’s not water but liquid methane in those rivers and seas. And the temperatures on Titan are so cold that water exists as ice and forms much of the land mass through which those methane rivers flow.
On Titan there is also an abundance of organic molecules bearing a resemblance to the building blocks of life we find here on Earth. And needless to say life on Titan may be organic-based but one cannot imagine it turning into anything resembling that which exists on Earth. Would a future robotic rover or human visitor even recognize life on Titan if stumbled upon?
Considering the Viking experiments and the controversy associated with detecting or not detecting life on Mars, it is pretty clear that recognizing life we find elsewhere in the near-space of the Solar System will be difficult. And when we can’t devise an experiment to recognize it or visually identify it, yet it’s there, that will certainly be problematic.
That to me makes Elon Musk’s Martian venture and the Mars One project very dangerous steps for our species to take. Establishing colonies there means permanent contamination of an alien ecosystem with the potential extermination of its native life. Or maybe that life kills us before we kill it.
In H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, the Martians, with their superior technology, arrive on Earth and overwhelm our human defenses. Ultimately, however, it is our native microbial allies that kill them off.
Wells parable should not be taken lightly. We may not come as invaders to conquer Mars, but when we arrive there we may face the risk of being exposed to an incompatible form of life that kills us.
Yet it is clear that we, as a species, are outward bound to go beyond Earth this century. Why does that mean we need to find alien ground to colonize?
We have the potential to engineer communities in space, to make them self-sustaining habitats capable of duplicating conditions on Earth. A Deep Space habitat would use resources mined from lifeless asteroids and comets to provide the material, fuel, water and breathable air needed to be self-sustaining. Such habitats could draw upon the continuous energy of the Sun and move around on the solar wind. Habitats could even simulate Earth gravity, and if and when we want to feel like we are on the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere, we could create habitats that simulate those bodies’ conditions.
To me, this is a far better way for us to establish our off-world presence than what Musk and others are proposing, and certainly, one that is less fraught with risk to both our species and to life that may already exist on nearby alien worlds.
Mars 2022 and 2024 – Elon Musk’s BFR Reveal
Musk’s new vision is code named BFR. He intends to build and launch the first two of these new rockets in 2022, followed by four heading for Mars in 2024. The first two would be cargo ships. The next four would be split between cargo and passengers.
In his previous proposal unveiled at a similar event in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2016, Musk described the Interplanetary Transport System, a 90-meter tall, reusable ship that would operate on a 26-month cycle between Earth and Mars, when the two planets were best aligned.
The challenge to this idea was its sheer scale, very ambitious, and very expensive. Musk, at the time, described a private-public partnership as the means by which his Mars vision could be realized.
But in this new iteration, he is going smaller and plans to use the resources of SpaceX and its reusability paradigm to achieve his Martian dream. Everything in SpaceX current inventory, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Dragon, can be repurposed to achieve his 2024 timeline, Musk states. The first ships would carry a complement of 100 on board. Musk envisions 40 cabins, a large common area, central storage, a galley, and solar storm shelter for its human occupants.
Musk also believes that the BFR concept could serve Earth travel as well. At his presentation, he described how the rocket could provide sub-orbital transportation between any two points on Earth in 30 to 60 minutes. With 100% reusability, multiple redundancies for safety, and the expertise already gained from SpaceX increasing successes, Musk argues that the cost to provide these services beyond the fuel requirement and regular maintenance of the vehicle and launch facility will be minimal, like flying on any commercial aircraft today.
The BFR project, as Musk describes it, doesn’t need the private-public partnership of his previous Mars’ vision. He stated that the revenue SpaceX receives today from its Earth satellite launches, as well as the sub-orbital transportation business he envisions will make more than enough money to make the Mars project viable.
Lockheed Martin’s Red Planet Base Camp Plans
The company, that along with Boeing, has been NASA’s primary commercial supplier, was also in Adelaide, presenting a different vision from that of Musk and SpaceX. Lockheed Martin has its own plan to send humans to Mars in the 2020s. Instead of hundreds, the company sees a crew of between four and six making the trip.
Called Mars Base Camp, it involves several steps.
Lockheed Martin claims to have all the technology at present needed to achieve the Base Camp mission which would utilize:
The company envisions a three-year mission where its human crews would largely never step foot on Mars but rather would orbit the planet. The crews would send robotic landers and rovers to the surface to explore potential landing sites, discover areas where resources could be exploited, and pick up samples for analysis back in orbit. In a white paper the company has prepared, it describes side visits by astronauts to the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos. It also introduces a reusable lander, seen in the illustration below, which would be able to descend with a crew of four to the surface and return for refueling in orbit. The lander would have sufficient life-support on board for missions lasting up to two weeks away from the Base Camp.
Lockheed Martin doesn’t speculate on how its Mars Base Camp will be funded. It more than likely sees NASA and its international space program partners coming up with the cash. Its project is very much in the tradition of NASA, focused on science and exploration.
Musk founded SpaceX, on the other hand with a mission to make the human species multi-planetary. Musk wants to settle us on Mars and eventually terraform it to make it our second home.
In his presentation in Adelaide, he talked about the red skies and blue sunsets of Mars, the opposite of what we see here on Earth. You can feel his passion and the sense of urgency he brings to this vision, far different from that displayed in the promotional-style video that accompanied Lockheed Martin’s presentation.
Will either of these two projects ever happen?
We saw humans land on the Moon from 1969 to 1972. It’s 45 years later and no humans have ventured beyond Earth orbit. Musk, in his presentation, asked why there is no human lunar presence today, no research station in orbit or on the surface. It’s a fair question and one that many who lived through the Apollo landings continue to ask.
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