There is absolutely no scientific research to show this is true. It simply hasn't even been done. For crying out loud, there are people who will be going into the ISS to stay there for more than a year in basically a microgravity environment for that length of time. I'm not saying there will be zero impact, but it seems highly unlikely that 12 months of living on Mars is going to make it impossible to return to the Earth.

At the very least, cite your source of info. When living on Mars, you will still need to have your heart pump extra hard climbing stairs or doing other forms of physical exertions that simply is not true for people on the ISS, and there have not been human-sized centrifuges capable of simulating Martian acceleration.

So is the Earth. Perhaps they will need to dig down a little bit, and being on Mars will certainly be better than sitting inside of a spaceship under any circumstance. Radiation is not the big problem you make it out to be and are demonizing a problem that already exists even on the Earth. It is a problem already being addressed by spacecraft construction and something dealt with literally daily by those on the ISS. Of all of the problems that are going to face settlers on Mars, radiation is the one thing that everybody already knows how it will be dealt with and how it can be compensated for by those going to Mars.

It is also one problem that can also abundantly be dealt with by building shelters with local materials.

BTW, Aluminum smelters may very well show up on Mars and be there sooner than later. Mars is also covered with silica in various forms, so glass is also something that can be made with local materials. The problems you are posting here are sort of just getting downright silly at this point.

If it was certain that we as a species need to leave the Earth in 5-10 years or face complete extinction, we would need to make some significant changes in political policy in regards to a number of different things. Luckily, that isn't the case and the general presumption is that we have many centuries left before a civilization collapse, much less a mass extinction event.

On the other hand, should we, collectively, be spending about the same level of resources toward potentially saving the species by moving a portion of mankind to another planet as is currently being spent on lipstick or shaving cream? I think that sounds like a reasonable proposition. Let's at least do that and get say one or two people out of ten thousand working on that problem or contributing resources to such an endeavor.

You are aware that many of the mineral deposits on the Earth that have high quantities of rare minerals likely have an extra terrestrial origin. In other words, companies have been mining asteroids for decades already.

What you miss in your presumption that it is so easy to get minerals from the crust of the Earth is that you have to deal with a constant 10 m/s^2 acceleration for stuff you do here on the Earth. Most of the really easy to reach deposits have already been exploited on the Earth, so what is happening now are activities to extract those resources by digging down deeper into the crust or literally removing whole mountains to get at that stuff. It isn't cheap or nearly so easy as you are suggesting.

Rio Tinto, to give an example of an existing mining company here on the Earth, already spends many billions of dollars simply to open up a basic mining operation to extract simple resources like copper or gold. Such deposits that can be done productively in that same manner are increasingly hard to find as well I might add. No doubt there are still as of yet undiscovered major deposits of some of these minerals, but surface minerals that can be easily mined and sorted out to various elements in not nearly as easy as you are suggesting either. If you can find a deposit of iron that is 5% or so in concentration, there are several companies I could point to right now that would buy that land and dig it up.... if that was easily obtained from surface extraction methods.

My point is that building a mining operation on an asteroid with current technology for spaceflight is on roughly the same scale of costs as is needed now for doing a terrestrial mining operation for much poorer quality of raw materials. Many of the asteroids that can be mined practically pass right by the Earth, and in a few cases even pass between the Earth & the Moon. Those can be efficiently mined in total, where some of them definitely have minerals far more concentrated in some rare elements than is the case on the Earth. Those will be the first extraterrestrial mining targets.

Of course one of the most valuable minerals in space right now is simply ordinary water, usually in the form of ice. It is cheaper and easier to capture ice from the outer Solar System or even from passing comets than it is to launch it from the Earth. That happens to be the business plan for Planetary Resources, who unfortunately lost their first spacecraft in the explosion of the Antares rocket built by Orbital Science. They have actual hardware going into space, which should show they are serious about the idea and are willing to spend some big bucks to get there.

It will really be the market place that will decide if it is worth the cost of mining asteroids or not, and I will find it interesting to see what people pontificating about this concept will say a century from now. I don't think those space-based mining operators need to be subsidized either, and some people with money are trying to make it happen regardless of what you think about the idea.

Elon Musk has suggested the cost of a round-trip passage to Mars is likely going to cost about $500k. That may seem like a whole lot, but it is comparable in price for somebody from a modern 1st world country to what people were paying in the 18th Century for passage to European colonies in terms of needing to literally sell everything they had including their house, save up for years, and then put all of that money on the line for a trip to the colonies.

As for the "tons of supplies needed to keep you alive there", only the first few colonists are going to need that mountain of supplies. Even then, such colonies will simply fail unless they are able to use local resources to produce literally everything they are going to need for survival. Food and the air that everybody will breathe on Mars will by necessity need to come from local resources and can't be reasonably brought from the Earth. Other supplies like clothing, toiletries, and even building materials for shelters will much sooner than later need to come from local materials as well, and will be required to come from local materials once more than a dozen or so people are on Mars.

It will not be like the Apollo missions when people go to Mars.

As for money on Mars, I'm sure the people who will live on Mars will figure out a currency among themselves for the allocation of scarce resources. Your presumption that there will be no means to "make money" simply shows a lack of understanding of economics.

I don't even know how to respond to the rest of your essay here. Mars has more area to roam upon than the land area of the Earth. I'm sure that is plenty of room for various kinds of political philosophies, from hardcore communism to libertarian utopias and everything in between. It won't be easy to do any of this, and mistakes will be made. If you don't want to be involved, I don't mind nor should you be required to pay for any of it (in my opinion). Just stay the hell away from me or anybody else who tries to do this is all I ask.

The gravity of Mars is only 2/3rds that of the Earth. Less than the Earth to be sure and could cause some problems, but the bones of people and their genetic stress loads were forged by evolutionary pressures here on the Earth. Perhaps a million or more years from now another species of the Homo genus that evolves from Homo Sapiens might live on Mars and have difficulty adapting to life on the Earth, but over the course of a few thousand years those living on Mars will have no problem at all in terms of returning back to the Earth. DNA just doesn't change that quickly.

Most definitely children who may be born on Mars in the 21st Century will have no problem returning to the land of their grandparents and taking a hike through the Grand Canyon or climbing the Alps. They may need some endurance training like is sort of the case for some inner city youth who don't get much physical exercise, but that is more the analogy that you would need to worry about.

Certainly don't apply lessons presumed for the birth of animals in a microgravity environment (aka on the ISS) to what is going to happen for those creatures born on Mars. Such studies haven't even been done yet. Yes, I am making a presumption here that all will be fine but I am making the assumption that this is something controlled by DNA, not by gravity. Placental mammals in particular are nurtured in a neutral buoyancy environment before birth, which is why I really doubt that especially gestational development matters much in terms of the gravitational environment they are developed in. Ditto for kids raised on Mars, other than they will develop a very healthy respect for air locks or face Darwinian selection for screwing around with those kind of dangerous parts of their living space.

In many cases the early explorers simply didn't even know what to expect. There were many sailors on the voyages of Christopher Columbus who died of scurvy, something that continued to persist for nearly a century even after many well established colonies existed in New Spain. The settlement of Jamestown in Virginia also died out largely due to malnutrition, in a region that is now a major agriculture production area I might add too. Some of the problems happened due to a failure of understanding of the environment, or that there were things they needed to know before hand but largely couldn't until they got there.

I'm afraid that much of the same situation will happen on Mars, there are things we simply don't know that can cause some problems. On the other hand, people discovered how to survive and thrive in those areas of the world where previously people died by the thousands. The cause of and the cure for Malaria was found eventually, a cure for scurvy was found by simply eating citrus fruit and eventually other solutions too, and in the long run the knowledge of all of these things have improved the lives for everybody.

Something very simple that can and ought to be tested is simply the problems of sexual reproduction of placental mammals and simply getting that to be investigated. I can think of far more things that need to be studied as well. This is very fundamental and basic research that needs to take place.

Bootstrapping an industrial base is something that similarly can have some very positive benefits around the world, where the concepts on how to bootstrap an industrial society on Mars can also be done in Liberia, Somalia, or even Alaska and arguably even Detroit. I could see some real benefit to teaching children in high school or even middle school how to use tools that make tools and teaching them how to rebuild society if necessary, or at least as an educational experience to learn how things can be made.

Most of the things that still need to be done in terms of going to Mars don't cost that much money, but do take some substantial changes in attitude towards how things are done. I do like the fact that some people have started and are trying to pick off the low hanging fruit in terms of studying the effects of long term isolation or trying to figure out what kind of EVA missions will likely need to be done on Mars. Much more could be done though.

If you are really paranoid about such things, one of the best places in the USA to avoid all of that is the city of Blanding, Utah It is geologically stable (very few earthquakes), enough older mountains to keep tornadoes from spawning, and far enough away from any ocean that any hurricanes that might form are at worst a mild tropical storm dropping some extra rain. There aren't even major rivers nearby that can cause significant flooding and it is far enough from major metro areas that you likely could survive even a major nuclear war. It is dry enough that even major forest fires are seldom things to cause problems. There isn't much else to do in the town either, but I suppose that is the price you pay for such a mundane location in the world.

I've lived in both earthquake country and in the tornado belt (southern California and southern Minnesota respectively). Neither one really has all that much predictability, although tornadoes generally (from my experience) do much more localized damage than earthquakes.

Floods are by far more destructive than either one, where I've seen flood waters come up gradually over the course of a day or two and gradually wipe out entire neighborhoods. You can take things out of such homes (even get a U-haul to move stuff while the flood is still rising), but destruction is all but certain for anything remaining. While I've been in earthquakes that have knocked me off my feet, the homes and businesses around me still stood up and everybody went back to work, school, or doing whatever it was that they did before. That was definitely not the case with floods where I've seen half the city cut off from the other half disrupting commerce and even daily commutes for people needing to work on either side of the flood or for those businesses or homes drowned out in that flood.

Tornadoes just make for some excitement or panic for a little bit when the sirens go off. My grandmother said it reminded her of bombing air raids during World War II.

I still don't get the distinction. Tesla is deliberately trying for creature comforts similar to a high-end BMW or Lexus. That is why they have an internet connection in every car with a built-in web browser, high-end seats, and other features where you travel in style. What other luxury frills are missing? Gold-plated consoles and hummingbird tongues?

What Ronald Reagan arguably did wasn't the speech, but his massive expansion of the U.S. military including the thousand ship navy and expanding the other branches as much too. It was something that Russia had to match and basically went bankrupt trying to do so (and America nearly did as well). It is hard to say that Reagan had no impact upon the events surrounding the fall of the wall, although another significant event that had a major role was the disarmament talks that happened in Iceland a little bit later... and Reagan just walking out in the middle of those talks.

Nobody is saying it was the speech that caused the wall to go down, but it was due to the fact that East Germany didn't fear the Soviet Union was going to crush any independent expression on the part of its leaders that caused the wall to go down. I doubt that would have happened under an extended presidency of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

What has GM done about electric automobiles? Ford? At best all I can see is that they are hiring lobbyists to craft state laws to exclude Tesla automobiles from being sold when they would have been legal under earlier laws.

That doesn't sound like people trying to innovate and compete in the market place. Instead, it sounds like people who are scared of the future and don't want to make any sort of long-term investments into a new kind of technology.

Yeah, GM has the Volt. It is basically a conventional automobile with a very complicated drive train that includes an over-sized starter motor and a larger than normal battery. Toyota treated the idea serious enough that they invested into Tesla in a big way (with the Toyoda family... who controls the Toyota company... personally investing too). Nissan has the Leaf, which is really the only significant competitor right now. GM had the EV-1, but got really stupid about marketing and even disposing of those vehicles.

How else would you describe the Model S? An SUV?

It isn't nearly as trivial as you seem to make it here. Tesla did the hard part by designing their cars to accommodate the higher capacity storage battery systems as well as spent considerable engineering effort to get a battery pack that size which could also meet U.S. Department of Transportation requirements to be a standard part in an automobile. Nissan hasn't put in that kind of effort. It isn't like you are strapping extra batteries on the roof of your car with duct tape and bailing twine, but rather making it something safe that can be driven on a daily basis in a large variety of conditions.

The other problem is that Tesla presumed they could get the Li-ion cells needed for all of the automobiles that they were producing, and Nissan wasn't quite so sure. As it turned out, Nissan was mostly correct as the global battery cell market wasn't ready for that kind of major application. Tesla has instead needed to build their "Gigafactory" for producing the batteries instead, which has required a major pile of capital that an automaker typically doesn't want to bother with unless absolutely necessary. Tesla is going to be bringing these battery backs to their assembly plant in California by the trainload.

Give it time though. Eventually other automobile companies are going to catch up to Nissan and Tesla.

At the moment, Tesla is selling more cars than it can produce. I don't think they are hurting for finding people who can afford their prices right now.

Perhaps when Tesla gets to 500k vehicles produced on an annual basis your complaints about cost and ordinary people not caring will actually resonate and mean something. In the meantime, they don't even have a marketing budget other than to run their company website and work with journalists who make an earnest inquiry about the company.

I'll also note that yesterday I made a trip that I couldn't have made with a Leaf, and sadly it is pretty regular as well. A few hundred mile range is pretty much something needed if you live in the western USA.

It also sounds like you don't get the business model that Tesla is using to sell their vehicles when you go about complaining that there isn't an "affordable" car they are producing.