The Case for Martian Colonization | Brian Cox and Joe Rogan

But for whatever reason, that becomes more interesting because it's in our neighborhood. Whereas if they find some distant star system and that it might have a planet that's similar to Earth, that doesn't seem as compelling for whatever weird reason. Yeah, I mean, I think the planets around Alpha Centauri, Proxima Centauri, which are the closest stars, it seems like there are planets around those now. And I think that was interesting because we could conceive of going there. Right. And there was this idea, Stephen Hawking actually and some others before he died had this idea called Breakthrough Starshot, which is the idea to send a little probe out to the Alpha Centauri system. And I think in their view, Yuri Milner as well, the entrepreneur wanted to do that. And I think it's something like 100 years travel time or something with our current technology. And they pointed out that we don't do that now. We don't think 100 years in the future. But if you go back when people were building cathedrals, people used to routinely start projects that would take 100 years to bear fruit. And so we could imagine going there. And that then becomes fascinating, I think, because then you've got a solar system, another solar system that you could go and visit conceivably. Conceivably. Yeah. I mean, what kind of speed are we talking and how long would it take to get there? Well, yeah, I mean, so it is, I think the idea was about 100 years to get there. So it's going four light years or so in 100 years or whatever. So you would have to essentially do what they did in like the Ridley Scott Alien film and put people into some sort of a robot probe. It wouldn't be a crew. Wouldn't be possible for a crew. Well, it is. But you have to freeze them. Yeah, that's always that, you know, when you talk to engineers, you had Elon on, didn't you? Engineers always say, you know, physicists go, well, it's possible in principle. So over to you, you know, you do it now. There are no laws of physics that tell us we can't do it. So we just do it. Right. But you know, it's a weird relationship between the physics physicists and the engineers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but yeah, in principle, you're right. If you can send a little robots spaceship there, you can send a crewed spaceship. I'm of the opinion as time goes on and augmented and virtual reality gets better and better that it doesn't really totally make sense unless we're talking about colonizing someplace to send biological life to another planet. If we can send some probe that doesn't have to worry about the biology being affected by radiation or by the speed of travel or even by food, we can send something out there and almost be there by virtue of, you know, goggles, virtual reality goggles or something else. Yeah, you hear that in science at the moment, space science, we have this debate a lot, actually, because of course, space probes like Curiosity, that's on Mars at the moment, that's really cheap compared to sending people to Mars. And so quite often the scientists who want to find out about the world will say, well, we should spend it on robots. We shouldn't spend it on people. I think crewed space exploration is in some ways, I mean, it's clearly true at the moment that humans can do more than robots. So we can explore the place better for now. Yeah. But but I think it has to be it's about something else. I mean, it's about it. And it's not only it's about living and working off the planet, which I think is quite a persuasive argument, actually, we've already industrialized near Earth orbit. So it's already a multi billion dollar industry, you know, communication satellites and weather satellites, GPS, whatever, yet we're already up there. And so learning to live and work in space is, I think, a natural extension of our of our civilization. Plus the fact if you talk to Elon or Jeff Bezos, they point out that the amount of resources available just slightly above our heads is vast. And so I remember I talked to Jeff Bezos actually once and he thinks really simply and he said, you know, for example, in the asteroid belt, there's enough metal, I think to build a skyscraper. What is it? Something like 800 stories tall and cover the earth in it, right? If you want. Now we don't want to do that. His point was that the energy from the sun is all up there, the resources are up there. So you could almost imagine trying to zone the earth residential at some point in the future to protect the planets and do your heavy industry off the planet, for example. And these sound this sounds like science fiction, except that now, SpaceX and Blue Origin, those people have got reusable rockets. So suddenly the economics become sensible. So I think I think I think expansion is good. And I think we will expand. And I think we will expand outwards, because there's not much room left on this planet to expand. So I think we'll do so. But that's a whole different idea. It's not about gathering scientific information. It's about a frontier and all the benefits that come from operating as a civilization on the frontier, which we've lost on the earth because there is no frontier left. And so I like that idea that Mars and when you talk about Mars, especially with Elon, he's right that that's the only place you can go. So there is no other planet we can go to other than Mars. You can't go to Jupiter or Saturn. You can't go to Mercury or Venus. So if we want to go somewhere and expand our civilization, it has to be Mars and everything's there that you need. So that's a different thing saying you want to find out stuff. You're right. If we just want to find out stuff, then you send robots. But as far as expanding actual civilization and bringing it to another place, one of the things that freaks me out is people get depressed about living in Seattle. I mean, you're going to live on Mars? I wouldn't. I agree. It's a horrendous thing. It's like the Western frontier. It's the frontier when people cross the States. Incredibly dangerous thing to do. And it's when people cross the States, they still got to Wyoming and beautiful places and Colorado. Yeah, but it was hard. I wouldn't have wanted to do it. But once you got there, there's a river and there's trout in the river and the meadows are green. It's right. I mean, I agree with you, right? I mean, I'm not going to go there till there are vineyards and hotels and things. But however, it is true that there are people who like the challenge. And what is true about Mars? It's interesting, actually, because we know something about the history of Mars now, quite a lot about the history of Mars. And it's certainly clear that there was water, almost certainly oceans and rivers. So and that water is almost certainly still there. So I would say certainly still there. Well, they have found large quantities of ice now, right? Yeah, so there's certainly ice. There may even be pockets of liquid water below the surface somewhere. So couple that with all the minerals and the resources that we know are there. And you have everything you need. So that's the thing about Mars. It's quite nice relative to everywhere else other than the Earth. You can't go to Venus. You just melt. It's what is it? 400 and something degrees and 90 atmospheric pressure. So so so Mars is quite nice. But I wouldn't go there. I agree with you. What's not gravity of Mars in relationship to third? It's what is it about third, I think third. Right? Yeah, something like so it would still have a significant like weakening effect. Like if you went to Mars, and then somehow or another in the future, they were able to get back to Earth. Yeah, your body would have a real problem with that, right? It would. But there is, there is still gravity, it's a bit more than a third, I can't quite remember, but it's something like that. But yeah, so there's still gravity. So there's gravity, there's some protection from that you'd probably want to live in the caves actually, or something like that. Because there's no magnetic field there. So it's quite a high radiation environment, but not too bad. It's further from the sun than we are. It's not too, there are places on Mars that there's a very deep crater called Hellas, which is a big impact basin. And at the bottom, the it's so deep, you could fit Everest in it. So you put Mount Everest in there, the summit of Everest wouldn't reach the rim of the crater. So it's something like, I don't know what it is, seven miles deep or something, six miles deep. So you could go there and at the bottom, the atmospheric pressure is so high that you could just about have liquid water occasionally on the floor of that crater. So it's quite warm. Sometimes it can be 20 degrees. Really? Yeah, there Celsius. Wow. So better than Minnesota right now. Exactly. Minnesota is experiencing a serious cold front. That's right. Yeah. So it can be warmer than Minnesota. And so there are places where it's not horrendous on Mars. You know, so the Martian is kind of realistic in that sense.