#tesla.

Lets colonize Mars.

I saw the Mat Damon Movie “The Martian.”  It was pretty good.  It is the most recent of a few good movies about Mars.  All are stories that use science for dramatic purposes and for the good of the drama often forget the science.  Sometimes the Drama gets silly like the giant face in the one film to send the human to meet the Aliens who “seeded” life on earth.  God in a space ship is a pretty common theme.

The bit in “The Martian” about surviving a disaster has to to with air pressure.  Mars has an atmosphere, just not much of one.  The maximum air pressure in the bottom of the deepest canyon on Mars is just about the level where water boils at body temperature.  Even breathing pure oxygen at that pressure is not enough to support life.  You get less O2 than being at the top of Everest in the death zone.

So when the astronaut fixed the hole in his habitat with duct tape and clear plastic it would not really be able to hold the pressure needed to keep a human alive in pure oxygen.  And pure Oxygen is really dangerous.  The story would have been just as good without that bit.

Sending humans to Mars will happen sometime.  But they will be provided with all the food, water and life support they need for the whole visit from Earth. With sufficient power they may be able to harvest and recycle the air in the habitats but true self sufficiency is not in the cards.  The idea of sending people one way is a valid scheme as long as everyone is cool with the ideal of all of them dying there.  Hopefully from old age, not starvation or asphyxiation.

It actually makes more sense to colonize the moon.  It is closer and there may even be things we can do and make there that are genuinely valuable to us back on earth.  Once you have the moon going Mars is just a much bigger more remote moon.  It is not really any better.

Mr Elon Musk of Tesla fame is a pretty good cheer leader for technology.  He wants to actually build the Sci-Fi  fantasy you read in the stories. He wants to colonize Mars.  He wants to build a network of high speed trains running in vacuum tubes  I like those stories.  Unfortunately Tesla was not any kind of breakthrough in technology.  All the technology in his cars was rather old and very well established.

There were electric cars in the 19th century.  The only thing that is allowing the current crop of hybrids and electric cars is batteries are really good now.  That did not come from the needs of transportation, but laptop computers, then smart phones.  The technology to do everything he is doing is not cutting edge or in most cases even new.  He is cleverly exploiting things from other fields, not inventing new things.

So he may believe things and encourage people to invest in stuff.  This does not mean they are good ideas.  Investing in science is a good thing, but ironically it only really works if you have no specific goals other than to figure out why things happen.  Trying to research only things that can be sold as products never really works.  It forces researchers to either lie to the money about what their goals are or to fail.  Failure happens a lot.  That is why experiments are done.  They indicate if the assumptions or expectations of the tests were right or wrong.

Billions are spent on hope.  They know something will happen, and often it is unexpected.  About 60 years ago there was a mystery in the world of deep quantum Physics.  About 6 people in the world really cared about it.  It was a mystery, and working on that could actually solve some other problems.  But it would be really expensive.  They needed a big machine.  More people got interested.

So they decided to build it. It took decades.  It took billions.  It was not intended to make anything that would be for sale or would lead to products.  It was just to know.  It was just to answer a few questions.  It has the unglamorous name of the LHC.  And to make it work and to make it possible for the thousand of scientists to communicate  and discuss results they built the internet.  It was not a goal it was just attaching Universities to each other then creating an addressing protocol so messages could be sent. 

That is why nobody actually owns the internet.  It was something clever people built for their purpose and other people found that they could use it for other stuff.  Science and discovery is like that.

It is dangerous to say we should do this or build that all we need is to invent technology that will make it possible.  That almost never happens.  What happens is someone has made something and someone else finds another use.

Mr Musk started Tesla by literally cramming laptop batteries into a small sports car chassis.  Neither were invented or even made  by his company.  It was a toy and it worked pretty well.  Running with the idea he did very well.  Congrats.