Posted on 03/04/2021 1:49:22 PM PST by Eleutheria5
There’s no place like home—unless you’re Elon Musk. A prototype of SpaceX’s Starship, which may someday send humans to Mars, is, according to Musk, likely to launch soon, possibly within the coming days. But what motivates Musk? Why bother with Mars? A video clip from an interview Musk gave in 2019 seems to sum up Musk’s vision—and everything that’s wrong with it.
....Sagan believed that if we had a photo of ourselves from this distance, it would forever alter our perspective of our place in the cosmos.
But there Musk cuts himself off and begins to laugh. He says with incredulity, “This is not true. This is false––Mars.”
He couldn’t be more wrong. Mars? Mars is a hellhole. The central thing about Mars is that it is not Earth, not even close. In fact, the only things our planet and Mars really have in common is that both are rocky planets with some water ice and both have robots (and Mars doesn’t even have that many).
Mars has a very thin atmosphere; it has no magnetic field to help protect its surface from radiation from the sun or galactic cosmic rays; it has no breathable air and the average surface temperature is a deadly 80 degrees below zero. Musk thinks that Mars is like Earth? For humans to live there in any capacity they would need to build tunnels and live underground, and what is not enticing about living in a tunnel lined with SAD lamps and trying to grow lettuce with UV lights? So long to deep breaths outside and walks without the security of a bulky spacesuit, knowing that if you’re out on an extravehicular activity and something happens, you’ve got an excruciatingly painful 60-second death waiting for you.....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
“But, if you think ‘Mars is hell’, which other planet would you suggest?”
There’s no good candidate. Mars is just the least worst candidate. It’s like asking “well, which Democrat would you prefer for President?”
So we’ve found the birthplace of the Democrat species.
They ruined an entire planet and came here.
I’m reminded of the reason(s) spoken by Jefferey Sinclair on Babylon 5.
Yep, wherever humans go, we will take all of our human problems with us. We can’t escape ourselves.
Leftists don’t have the math to get a foot off terra firma, let alone the ballistic cAlc to navigate to Mars.
Another funny “hell” Far Side is where the video rental in hell only has one movie- Ishtar. I guess Gary Larson watched Ishtar and didn’t care for it too much.
Are there tsunamis there?
Uncanny Valley Girl...
It’s much more feasible to build underground or underwater cities right here on Earth that might be able to survive some global catastrophe than to do either one of those alternatives.
Of course, we won’t do either of those things, because the cost-benefit analysis won’t work. Neither will it for colonizing Mars. Sure, some monomaniac like Musk can ignore such analyses and try anyway, but he’s not rich enough to fund the effort himself, so I think he’ll still fall way short.
At -80, no atmosphere, no UV protection, rain, soil etc etc, no one’s terra-forming Mars. Ever.
“Any community on Mars will be by definition far-removed from current earthly political trends”
But it won’t be far removed from humans, and all that human nature brings with it.
“They would taste the vacuum of space long before they reached the destination.”
Great, then you get a decade or two of peace before the next generation grows up, and then what are you going to do? Execute half of them if they start espousing the wrong ideas?
I scanned the story from Atlantic and it’s a hit piece on Musk. Talking about Mars is just an excuse for Atlantic to throw mud at Musk, one of the very few billionaire business guys who supported President Trump.
If Musk wants to go to Mars, all the power to him, I say.
To Musk, going to Mars is a publicity vehicle equivalent to Trump publishing his best seller, Art of the Deal, back in 1987.
What’s a few thousand gallons of rocket fuel if everybody on the planet learns your name?
I agree.
We should be preparing...
I remember a movie a I saw when I was a kid “Robinson Crusoe on Mars” of which “The Martian” was a remake of. I’ll keep my feet on Earth, thank you.
What is the homeless situation like there?
With everything we’ve gone through with the coronavirus, it reinforces my feeling about if there is life out there on Mars, why in hell would anyone want to bring it back?
I love the idea of colonizing Mars someday but I feel like we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I’d rather see us figure out how to put an Ohio class submarine into orbit. or a aircraft carrier. Either would be much easier than colonizing Mars and would yield far more benefits. WTH are we going to do on Mars? Nothing I want to do. We aren’t going to terraform it any time soon. But imagine what we could do with a nuclear powered aircraft carrier in orbit. That would be a new age in humanity.
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