I’m sure it will be feasible in well under a millennia. It just needs the current crop of anti-science assholes do die so we can get a good couple centuries of basic research done without funds getting cut so rich goons can buy another mega yacht.
The more we see what they are up to, the more I think the tech business leaders are a death cult, but their bad intent is directed at us, not themselves.
We’re not throwing away life on Earth so Parasite Elon & friends can move to another planet!!
We’re not cutting healthcare to children, the elderly, our grandparents, our rural areas, our RED STATES, so Parasites like Musk can gain more govt funding!!
Fight the grift with 50501, & Indivisible
ACT
the reason we’re in this mess is that the nerds counted the stars in the sky and the zeroes in their crypto wallets instead of just counting the number of summers they have left.
It's like Musk naming SpaceX rockets after spaceships in the Culture books, missing the critical element of the Culture: they are a post-scarcity anarcho-socialist utopia in which vastly powerful AIs exist, not to benefit capitalists, but to ensure the well being and creative autonomy of all
“We” as a Society, will never live on Mars. Individuals in space suits may be there some day, but it can’t be colonized by people going about their lives.
**WE** know this, but I still think he should lead him and his buddies on a deep space "expedition" where they try to leave the solar system and never come back.
It will be at least several centuries before our technology could allow us to live beyond Earth sustainably IMO. Unfortunately this planet will be dead long before then if we keep going on our current path.
Can we just pretend like billionaires going to live on other planets is a good idea though? I’m totally fine with them blasting off into the stratosphere never to be seen again
If nasa had just been funded properly we'd have been on our way. Gateway station to the moon. A launching off point to Mars and companies not headed up by egotistical cunts building new space stations (Sierra space for example).
They like art deco too. Doesn't mean it's theirs. We should still try and advance technology to better society as a whole, but as far away from the hands of capitalists as possible
This is literally the hill I’ll die on. It is so much harder a problem than people think, and even the theoretical solutions people come up with are just weirdly terrible
I genuinely think a bunch of people will get moved into a semi-functional “colony” on the moon or mars or wherever. There will be one mechanical failure. And everyone will die. Just an easily foreseen thing that doesn’t have to happen and it burns me up it probably will.
The best we’ll have is Antarctic-style science stations with very few people, more likely robots. We’ll never leave the solar system and we won’t colonise anywhere else. We’ll live and die as a species on Earth. We’re attuned to this environment at this time only. Which we’re currently destroying …
The thing that gets me is, if you actually wanted to colonize another planet, you’d be testing it out in Antarctica, where people currently work. See if you can grow enough food to live, deal with medical emergencies without evacuating people, hell you could simulate time-delayed communication
No one does this because we’ve had people working in Antarctica for decades and it sucks! Mars would be infinitely worse: you can’t breathe the air, it’s colder, there’s a shit-ton of radiation, etc etc
There's also the psychological aspect. The people who most want to go live on Mars are exactly the wrong personality to be able to survive it. How long before one of them snapped and opened an airlock or shut off the air supply because the voices in their head told them to?
Yes, and the “leadership”… how long until the rich Asshole in charge tries to commit genocide of his “workers” because they started getting uppity? Elon Musk would make Mars into what we saw in the Schwarzenegger “Total Recall” movie. When you control all access to water and air…
Not untrue, but if we *don't* kill ourselves, it kind of depends on how far you want to stretch the definition of what constitutes a human, we could engineer something more or less human shaped but built for life in space, or pull a San Junipero and crew a ship with cyber-ghosts, for example
Nuclear winter earth a la 1984 tv movie Threads is more livable and survivable both as individual and species than a day on Mars (or the voyage) towards it.
My expectation is it will end up much like those idiots in the submarine. They think they're so smart they can cut corners and everything will be fine. No due diligence, no intellectual curiosity, unbelievably lazy and arrogant.
Tbf, I could totally imagine a crewed *outpost*, a la Antarctica, on Mars, but yeah, even ignoring the (incredibly thin) engineering margins, we also don't really understand as much as we need to about making closed-loop ecosystems work long-term to make an actual viable colony.
Sure, I think that’s a possibility, once they have enough failsafes and for a small number of people. I think a permanently occupied base would be a huge waste of money for little return compared to just sending robots. Civilization though. Not gonna happen.
People talk about space colonies as an alternative to Earth, and like, what are they going to do when they need to replace a solar panel or airlock gasket?
Never mind all the stuff we *don’t know* we need like soil microbes in our guts or whatever.
(I just felt the need to agree in detail I guess)
FUN FACT: NASA’s New Horizons took 9 1/2 years to get to Pluto, 39 AU or 3,627,000,000 miles from the Sun. It traveled at an average speed of 4.1 AU/year.
The closest exosolar planet Proxima Centauri b at 4 light years away would take 54,000 years to reach.
This guy, an astrophysicist, correctly understands it's impractical to settle Mars and then cynically assumes he knows what he's talking about with all other frontier tech from there
What pisses me off is the assumption that anything impossible within the next month will never happen ever - because if you say "Okay maybe that'll happen around 2050 or so" then they lose the ability to write off the technology, the science, and the efforts entirely. They're rejecting a future.
I think it's more probably the sort of thing where a hypothetical 5 dimensional being (which is supported by a lot of string theory stuff) could see time like a spatial dimension
even if i have to die eventually in the heat death, even just doubling my lifespan lets me get way further down my reading list
(and that's not to mention the potential *positive* societal effects of life extension, like people having personal stakes in preventing climate change)
Don't be too hasty Jeff. I think we should let Musk and Thiel and their fellow geniuses head over there as soon as possible and get started. Of course the communication timelag to Earth would necessitate some hands-on leadership.
It’s about time someone did a takedown of effective altruism… 1st encountered it on a 1st date when dude condescendingly explained to me that everything I learned about cultural competency in Americorps was not relevant because SCIENCE had the objective answers! That cult is the bane of the Bay Area
Shhhh. Let the billionaires go and try. It's the most effective way to be rid of them forever. To paraphrase Alien "In space, no one can hear Musk meme."
I can imagine some time quite far in the future (assuming our species survives) when it might be practical to attempt to terraform Mars and possibly some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn
But at our modern tech level it's the pipest of dreams
At the risk of sounding basic, I’m not averse to putting the cast of characters in that article into rockets and firing them at Mars and seeing what happens.
In the Silicon Valley ideology, the idea of an unlimited world where you can literally be like the emperor of Dune and command vassals is very attractive to many. Unlimited opportunities for the most monstrous startups with bio-nano-technologies, which cannot be hindered by the FBI or Congress
Therefore, most likely the colonization of Mars will result in the transformation of Earth into a most lifeless Mars with separate islands where a tolerable existence is maintained, and completely controlled by Hi-Tech czars. Wars between them for some digital spice-coin are also expected
had a friend 20 years ago blasting rats with simulated cosmic rays and as far as i know we still really haven't solved for shielding beyond van allen belts.
Yeah, there is no solution for cosmic radiation that is anywhere near currently technologically feasible both in travel and on Mars itself. That’s aside from sending people to Mars being pointless to begin with.
Wait. Hear me out: how about we tell “geniuses” like Musk that yes, of course it is possible. We already built you a colony in Mars. You leave on Thursday” and just load them up?
Nothing more insane than being unable to differentiate from sci-fi and reality, and turning capital and human suffering dials to the max to realize this bullshit premise. It’s an endless vacuum out there. We live on a perfect planet. Let’s plant trees and be happy for 10,000 years… it’s our turn.
Another example that money does not equal genius… Most of these men are not “technological thought leaders”. They are celebrity industrialists with social media accounts that have chosen technology as their industry.
Ann Reardon did a really interesting video about the whole food issue with traveling and colonizing Mars. I have a feeling all those billionaire techbros wouldn't enjoy it. Aside from all the other problems.
Book sold (to me). Rarely have I read someone who expressed their views on a difficult subject as clearly and convincingly as Becker does in this interview. Every answer is "I couldn't have said it better". And I can say things good!
There are several reason they are investigating this
1. They may find resources they can mine etc to make money and there are no environmentalists or laws there to stop them
2. They have already fucked up this planet with their greed and are looking to do the same elsewhere.
3. Promising something from science fiction, something they can make "progress" on but can never actually reach, is a tried-and-true scam that Silicon Valley has been using for ages. It's a great way to keep the money from gullible investors flowing.
Do they want the impossible, or is it just a lie they sell so they can continue destroying the planet in pursuit of greed without anyone trying to stop them?
If they sell people on the fantasy of colonizing other planets, fixing the one we’re on isn’t important.
This is a really good interview and I’m definitely going to read that book. Absolutely spot-on points about space colonization, though I do think it’s a wonderful dream and maybe something that will be done in the far future when a lot of other problems are solved. But not Mars. Fuck Mars.
Ooo an Ethics take, I'll have to add that to the list. But I suspect that space colonization hype is tied up in The Anacho-Capitolist libertarian wet dream of a unclaimed land and with RESOURCES free of someone telling them what to do. Escapist fantasy at best, dereliction of responsibility at worst
If you get past the first section of this book (the one about procreation in space) and still think space colonization is possible in the near term, I am not sure I have any hope for you as a thinker
“Once we’ve converted one to two hundred asteroids into resources hubs for manufacturing on our moon bases, we should have terraforming of the inner system viable by 2032.”
News Alert: “President-elect Rizzler found dead after failed ‘drink paint challenge’. Markets in collapse.”
I guess because I want humanity to survive, and not only that but thrive enough, so that we can explore the cosmos? I’ll never live to see it, but I still want that for whoever else comes down the line. Mostly because I want us to get to the point where we can emulate the things I read.
We’ll explore it through probes and whatnot. There’s no reason for any human to go. We’ll still garner knowledge and wonder. We can’t live in the ocean deep but can wonder at its marvels.
Some humans will make trips round Jupiter etc just because like a mountain, it’s there.
I’m more on the explore, Gene Roddenberry “holy shit now would you look at that” side of space travel. Humans have a pretty shitty track record of colonization. We have a perfectly good planet right here, might as well take care of that.
Predictions about the future are as accurate as they were 120 years ago.
Science does not say that living on Mars is impossible; only that it is really challenging.
The thermodynamics of Martian living are really bleak. There’s simply not a lot of energy available there, and a lot of problems that need massive amounts of energy to be solved.
The whole "science was wrong about a thing 120 years ago, so it's probably wrong about this too" thing is so eyeroll-inducing. Sometimes a thing is so challenging as to make it effectively impossible. How are we going to create a magnetosphere on Mars, for example?
I don’t believe musk as a human being maybe the excuses he is one of the planet. We should send them back.
He does have a death cult all the people he’s killing by cutting off the aid that we were giving to other countries and the poor and the starving
If you can't be bothered to google yer crackpot counter proposal to Mars before posting a comment, I will roast you with the white hot heat of a million exploding suns.
I charitably read those posts not as saying “We should do X instead of colonizing Mars!” but, rather, “impossible thing X is still obviously much less impossible than colonizing Mars”.
My basic physics assignment on magnetism asks them to give the magnetic argument why I (their HS physics teacher) can say with certainty there will be no Mars colony the next millennium. Simple answer: Mars has no magnetic field to speak of and so no protection against cosmic radiation or atmosphere
Bingo! Where would we be without our teachers? 🥹 I don't think I've ever learned as much in my life as I did K-12. My memory of K-12 is spotty, EXCEPT for my good teachers. We had our elder family's teachers [mostly greatest generation & some boomers], so it was super special. @zoiejc.bsky.social
A Martian colony with no sun, no breeze on your face or rain ever again? No birds, no trees, no grass, no rainbows . . . no swimming, no walking outdoors without great risk in a hermetically sealed suit. Trapped in a hermetically sealed "base" with artificial light . . . sounds exactly like prison.
So much of the human condition comes down to two things. We're afraid of dying. And we are not sure why we are alive in the first place. It's ok to be agnostic, folks! You can accept uncertainty -- and maybe that's healthier.
Mars has no magnetosphere. Humans can’t live there; they would be killed by the radiation.
He probably knows this, but since a habitat won’t be built in his lifetime, he feels he can get away with this nonsense.
If it were even possible, it would take a standard of technology that Aparthied Clyde and his ilk aren't capable of imagining (not only because they lack imagination, but also because they have helped drag the standard of technology into shit just so their lack of vision could be "profitable.")
Good luck on this. This topic gets a lot of people fired up with righteous disagreement they will couch as “open mindedness” and “scientific optimism”, because they’ve invested so much emotion into believing in this fantasy, propped up by the plethora of techno-fantasy of fiction claiming science.
I think its time for us to be honest about this -- their lofty futuristic goals are a misdirection to create a permission structure to not have to help the environment or the sick or the poor. Futurism = "I have more aspirational goals for humanity than ending world hunger" = absolved from helping
That’s pretty much the stated creed of the Longtermist and Accelerationist bunch: they claim it’s acceptable to “sacrifice” the planet and everyone on it for the sake of some hypothetical future generations living across the galaxy
And they conveniently think rich white people are most worth saving
It's great that one can always just find bigger numbers (A) to exponentially grow small numbers (B) to justify anything. What is the significance of those numbers? Who cares. Number go up.
(A: alleged time we have to the future.)
(B: what remains of today's population.)
What if there’s an imaginary 500 trillion future people, shouldn’t we make technology for them instead of trying to help and keep alive these measly 8 billion people??
I know, I shouldn't be such a #Luddite. Of course these #billionaires will make #technology that will help all those future imaginary people. It means nothing that they aren't making and haven't made technology that helps people today.
Just to clarify and narrow my position on this a bit - I think Elon is invested in stopping large scale ecological disasters, he knows moving most of the species off earth is a pipe dream. But he wants a society where its OK to jettison the poor, the sick, the chronically ill 1/2
on the grounds they are not a good use of resources, and those resources should be used instead to "build the future," rockets, AI research, etc. Thats why he's on Joe Rogan saying Empathy is an evolutionary misfire and we shouldn't be using it to guide our actions.
A misfire is that people like Musk are becoming supersonic high-tech tycoons today, when it's so easy to monetize some virtual product and instantly raise $$$ from 100 mln subscribers. These people are skilled hackers of economy, but in their theories they are terry fascists, nazis and sociopaths
Needless to say Musk subscribes to those ideas, and thinks he’ll be the Great Daddy of most of the hypothetical “future generations” (hence his weeeeiiirrd obsession with impregnating as many women as possible)
All fascists are obsessed with reproductive coercion, both narrowly and broadly. In a broad sense, this is similar to Romania, where the childless paid a higher tax, and the police could check at any time whether a woman was pregnant so that she could not have an abortion and hide it bc twas felony
I was thinking of the more narrow definition of cult and therefore using words in such a way as to possibly make the case for it to those who may not see it that way.
In terms of both difficulty and economics, I think we'd have a manufacturing orbital at L5 processing asteroids fetched by drone tugship, capable of turning them into consumer products to be sent down to Earth, before we have an established Mars colony capable of being self sufficient.
People won't try and settle off earth until we have an economy to draw them there and the economy will not be in going up and down large gravity wells, on and off big planets all day, that's always going to be the most expensive ticket.
And if there is an economy, colonies will stay in microgravity where the money is, with the people buying a ticket up not wanting to back go down a gravity well, until they know they can pay the next ticket up.
Also, if you fetch iron rich asteroids and turn them into giant hollow sausages, spin them, put a sea inside with comet ice and live floating on that, there's enough iron rich asteroids to make over a thousand times the surface area of Mars in habitat. Planets are a very inefficient use of matter.
My guesstimate timescale on something like this to be even slightly economic is the observation that using orbital mechanics you can move even things as big as asteroids around incredibly cheaply if you wait and nudge things right.
Maybe 50 years after you start, you get your first big rock back.
Yes we bloody well are, or in space at any rate. Musk is a deluded egregious wankpuffin with an ego the size of a small planet but he's not *entirely* wrong in his thinking here. Either we learn to live off-planet or we eventually die as a species on this planet; the mathematics are inexorable 1/2
2/2 oh and this isn't new thinking; google 'Lunan' and 'the politics of survival' - I learned this from Archie Roy and Duncan Lunan at ASTRA as an undergraduate in Glasgow in the early 1980s.
I think it would be interesting to poll people and get a sense of who is using ‘we’ to indicate present day existing people and who is using it to refer to hypothetical future humans.
A line that’s always stuck out to me is “If we have the technology to terraform another planet, then we have the technology to just fix Earth instead.”
Or to put it another way, “We need the technology to live sustainably on Earth if we ever want to colonize another planet.”
Instead we're doing what we've always done: make a big mess & kill a bunch of people, then migrate to a new place with a functioning environment, make a big mess, kill a bunch of people... rinse and repeat.
there’s a chapter in there that I keep going back to just because I love the writing. it involves s death. I should connect it to this, from the article.
Musk reminds me of those early Mormon leaders who sought to split-off from the rest of society so that they could live like Persian kings and marry harems-full of women, but instead of Utah and sisterwives, Musk wants to settle Mars and go all Bene Tleilax on the women. Deseret will become DeserX.
These articles only showed up when people wanted to attack Musk. But the difficulties were known about before, and solutions proposed. Getting set up on other planets means more people in more places, safer long term, as was worked out before most people knew Musk existed.
If we want to improve our overall odds of survival overall, the FIRST thing to do is to ensure THIS planet remains habitable.
Trying to terraform Mars while -oops! - Venusforming Earth is like a toddler applying to grad school. LAUGHABLY unqualified.
It’d be way easier and cheaper to fix the only planet we know of that is capable of supporting life than it would be to terraform literally any other planet to suit our needs.
Its a nonsensical argument because "make things run batter on earth" and "figure out how to send some people to Mars" are not opposing choices. You may as well get rid of the fashion industry, or archaeology, or restaurants, or a whole collection of other activities if you view it that way.
You're completely misunderstanding the nature of the problem.
We *have* a planet that is already terraformed. Indeed: it terraformed *itself*.
Maintaining this world as habitable is easy mode.
There is no “solution” (we are literally centuries away from colonizing Mars) because there isn’t a problem that can’t be solved by taking care of this planet. The idea that we have to become a multi-planet species is galaxy brained nonsense lead by racist as fuck industrialists.
There are a lot of compelling arguments against this obsession with a colonization of space, but I’m not sure that this is one of them. The fact that our time in the universe is limited does not imply that the time that people do have isn’t meaningful to them. Sorry if that’s not what you meant.
Yeah I wasn’t trying to be nihilist. I’m just not sure there’s a compelling reason. “So humanity will spread from Earth” doesn’t strike me as one. That doesn’t mean the acquisition of knowledge is bad.
What kills me the most about the "Making Star Trek the Future" set is that the vast majority either don't realize (or don't care) that mankind BOLDLY went and resolved hunger, poverty, inequality and disease on Earth BEFORE they could even begin to consider going "where no one has gone before".
To your point, imagine making a cogent debate on why vaccines cause autism the pivot to "scientific optimism" about living off-world. These two things don't coexist in actual minds.
What is possibly the most vital part of Star Trek. The US didn't go to space. The world did, which makes the whole space travel thing semi-believable.
It is also the part that seems the most unachievable.
I think that part is achievable. Probably not in my lifetime, but achievable. What’s NOT achievable: the magical technology. We have a massive problem with belief in techno-fantasy right now, partially because it’s a specialized area of knowledge… and the tech industry is run by delusional people.
Right. Teleporters are not realistic. Bones knew something was amiss there...
Hate to be a pessimist here, though, but I think warp speed is as realistic as global good will. The most fantastical part of Star Trek was that the human race got rid of money.
No, in TNG it was started in the immediate aftermath of WWIII when things were much worse than they are now (with help from the Vulcans), as seen in First Contact; and in TOS it started even earlier with STL ships & suspended animation, as seen in Space Seed.
I used to be really enthusiastic about space colonization, but that's because I used to be an idiot. Aside from the mere science of it, there is nothing for us out there. It's a fantasy that we need to outgrow I think.
I'm still enthusiastic about it. Imagine everything that wouldn't have to be done on earth. Most mines disappear.
Interplanetary colonisation would force people to think about atmospheres as something you have to take care of.
Can't dump a ton of CO2 in your crew compartment.
Our problems on earth do not come from a lack of technology or resources. They come from us. We're about to lose our own planet to capitalist greed, how can we expect to thrive in a barren radioactive hellscape like Mars? Earth is the only place in the universe that isn't hostile to the human body
If supporting the human population on earth is still too hard to accomplish, then trying to support a population in space is not only folly, it might actually be counterproductive to the species at large
This is pretty disappointing to see so many throw in the towel just because Werner VonMusk is a complete nazi asshole. If you read Kim Stanley-Robinson then you have been exposed to a variety of possibilities at least.
also, 'Aurora' shows how much of a fucking nightmare going off-earth would be. If there is another planet with even basic, cellular life, we will be eaten by its bacteria immediately.
Well, whether any of us likes or dislikes someone’s novels has little real impact on if humanity living on other planets has some percentage of potential or nnot.
Andy Weir was very upfront about his conscious decision to handwave radiation completely for the sake of storytelling in The Martian. Also, there’s this:
Would the radiation even be that big an issue for the story? An astronaut on the surface of Mars would average about 100 to 200 mSv/year. That is definitely in "certainly increased cancer risk" territory, but not high enough for acute effects.
"I'm not going to use Robert Heinlein as a political roadmap because his politics were trash." True. Science fiction is just fiction. It's a toy box of ideas. And toys aren't the real thing.
Yes. However it's unique to SF that some who idealize science think it is prophetic medium. They fall in love with a book that supports their disturbed notions and then try to make the ideas into glorious predictions. Mystery fans don't tend to want a Hercule Poirot to be a benevolent dictator.
As people get more misinformation (believing much of it by choice or ignorance) the problem is magnified. It's back to the importance of critical thinking. And I think we all see that lack of critical thinking is a bigger problem than any trends in fiction.
I like the article's point about how these billionaires are believing their own mad dreams and telling people "we can and should do this." We do a lot of great things with science, but these people embrace a complete misunderstanding of how we should use it.
Not to mention no magnetic shield protection from the sun. Too much radiation there. You’d have to live underground and never get pregnant. But perfect for DOGE incel bros. They should go immediately.
I want a reality show where we take all these "we're going to terraform Mars!!!!" twits, give them a barren allotment and make them produce food from scratch.
The control case will be someone's Uncle Bob, who also makes dandelion wine in the potting shed.
FUCK ME!!! I remember Biosphere 2. At the time, when I was a kid, I thought it was a cool experiment. After it failed, I saw an ad in the hallway of my college science building that it’d become a tourist attraction. I DID NOT know, that rat fucker was CEO
‘We’ll create Earth 2 on a planet that is less hospitable and more expensive to build on than the most inhospitable places on Earth.’ Be more efficient to just create a Closed system a mile under the Earth then doing the same thing in Mars.
An artificial magnetic field could be created with modern tech with proper space infrastructure - which Muskrat has, of course, neglected to build - and gravity can be mimicked by spinning.
Yeah, but that game's turns play out as *generations*. A game is often 10-15 generations long, which is over 250 years. Anyone thinking it's remotely possible in our lifetimes is, frankly, deluded.
Nobody saying that we'll "just" terraform Mars is worth taking seriously, but it's a physically-plausible hyper long-term goal. If you're imagining the future of an entire civilization and what we can do now to make that possible it's not a bad thing to float around as speculative fiction.
But why? In what hypothetical future scenario(s) would it be a better option/use of resources to transform an entire planet that’s currently utterly inhospitable to life into a clone of Earth vs. just fixing the Earth that already exists and that we already live on?
I suppose I could imagine a hypothetical future where that's a good idea, but it's certainly none of the ones I'm talking about. We will always have to be mindful about how we impact the Earth, but it isn't productive to think about a constant destroy/repair cycle. We ultimately need sustainability.
Terraforming is, again, a wild hypothetical for a far-flung future. It really isn't terribly difficult to imagine a time where our currently pressing climate and resource distribution issues require maintenance, not full-mobilization panic. Resources can be spent in multiple places.
The moon is a much better "short term" (by somewhat hilarious definitions of the word short) goal, for sure, though I think Mars has its appeal. I think we should have self-sustaining outposts there in the medium term in the same way that we have outposts in Antarctica. Not sure what'd come after.
Actual human settlements elsewhere than Earth, if they ever happen at all, will almost certainly be in large orbital structures like O’Neil cylinders. But not anytime soon, and certainly not under capitalism
They’re refusing to even consider trying/funding science to fix what we’ve done to Earth because it’s “too hard” but we’re supposed to believe that they can totally succeed on Mars, at a difficulty level set many thousands of times higher?
I think the entire idea of space colonization is ridiculous. We couldn’t get Biosphere2 to work even with cheating and adding to it partway through the original time frame, we’re not gonna build century ships.
sure but musk wants his space colony now, not longterm, because that allows him to waste shittons of money and resources on something impossible to satisfy his own ego
Unfortunately we're not talking "speculative fiction", we're talking present day business plans of resource hoarders. Business plans that are a serious threat to the future of an entire civilization.
The downstream benefits of manned space exploration and space science programs are well-established, so I'm all for funding them - it's an incredibly small part of the overall spending pie. That said, given the context we're talking in: the anti-Earth science Musk-Trump agenda sucks.
I was under the impression that this is what that long line city in Saudi Arabia is supposed to be.
Terraformed desert into a walled refuge for the rich once the rest of the planet becomes unlivable to the proletariat.
Though tbf, they seem quite unable to build that as well.
Oh that's just one of the minor details that need ironing out, probably by replacing the old core by ultra heavy unobtainium that also helps fixing that gravity glitch. Easy peasy.
Mars lacking a magnetic field is only really relevant on geologic timescales, its main role would be stopping the atmosphere from getting stripped away and 99% of that is already gone. Besides, there would be interim solutions for that (placing a "magnetic shield" at Mars L1 is the obvious one).
Magnetic fields provide a non-negligible source of protection from radiation but the majority of that filtering comes from our atmosphere. The main thing that the magnetosphere does is protect our atmosphere. The importance of that can't be overstated! Without a thick atmosphere we'd be like Mars.
More specifically: the magnetosphere diverts the constant barrage of low-energy radiation coming from sun. While that radiation would affect us, it also would strip our atmosphere away over tens of millions of years. That's a comically long time for civilization on other worlds, but it is important.
I know our atmosphere does a lot. I had the understanding it wasn't enough and that protection of the atmosphere wasn't the only thing the magnetosphere provided.
What if (just spitballing here) there was a planet that already had a thick atmosphere, and (mostly) comfortable temps for humans, and was located literally right under our feet? We could try living there.
"Besides, there would be interim solutions for that (placing a "magnetic shield" at Mars L1 is the obvious one)" That's another entirely imaginary technology. Sure, we can generate local intense magnetic fields, but not planetary scale weak magnetic fields. Have you penciled out the energy budget?
Few things are more infuriating than watching these fucking losers come up with every justification for why we can’t just take all their ill gotten money & use it to solve climate change & improve lives. Pipedream bullshit to escape accountability to the here & now.
We have a gem of a planet, but let’s burn it up and shit in it so billionaires can fantasize about living in an underground bunker on Mars, when these fucks already could go live in the bunkers they have here if that’s really the life they want for themselves. Stop taking us there with you.
Man, thank you for your post, because somehow it hadn't clicked that if Elon wants to go to Mars, he wouldn't be going there himself first, he'd be sending a shit ton of workers to die there first.
The moment I first heard Elon Musk talk about going to Mars, my mind immediately went to the movie “Moon” with Sam Rockwell. We won’t be going there anytime soon & the first people we send will basically be serfs/slaves with no recourse against the conditions.
Most likely, the first colonists we send to any other world in any number will be refugees who simply have nowhere else to go. And we'll expect them to be grateful for it.
The bunker's no fun without us. He's not happy with life on a more comfortable planet because he wants to be Cohagen from 'Total Recall', cutting off the air supply to sections where workers don't do as they're told.
Never forget that Elon was shown a plan to solve world hunger, with a price tag of $40B. His supporters whined that he "didn't actually have that money, it was all tied up in stocks". A week later he announced a plan to buy Twitter for $44B, using money from stocks he owned.
I have come to realize one of the most infuriating plot points of Horizon Zero Dawn is probably the most prescient: Faced with extinction, they still need the richest man in the world to pay for everything instead of locking him in a cage and taking it. And it just causes more disaster.
Obviously, this assumes a lot… but even if it took 1,000 years of effort to build an atmosphere it would take tens or hundreds of millions of years to be stripped away by solar wind.
Like, Mars has an atmosphere now it’s just not enough to breathe.
The recent book A City On Mars made a great point--it would be 1,000,000 times easier to build a city at the bottom of the ocean than on Mars/the moon.
But nobody is talking about colonizing the ocean floor because that's obviously not worth the effort.
The fact that not even one of the “let’s terraform Mars” guys has even suggested fixing Earth first as a proof of concept *should* be everyone’s clue that they’re all full of shit (and everything else they say is also shit)
also we would almost certainly need some of the same technologies to repair ecological damage on earth here first so it would be an important step along on the process
Yes, anyone who was actually *serious* about it rather than using the Effective Altruism/Singularity/TESCREAL excuses for why we should just give them all the money forever and not expect them to give any of it back would be eg funding carbon capture research
Which would be an important factor in keeping a smaller Mars bubble-type habitat inhabitable while work on the larger planet went on, if you believe that terraforming mars is both possible and desirable
I've seen criticisms of the Weinersmiths' book on Mars colonization, where they explain why you can't grow food on Martian soil due to poison in the soil, and people reply "We just need a technology to WASH the soil!"
And, like, is that a thing? we could do? for Earth soil???
Isn't there also something about the physical structure of much of Mars' dust that makes it dangerously sharp, adding another obstacle beyond chemical 'contaminants'?
That’s lunar regolith, not Mars dust. Despite its very thin, low pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere, Mars has winds to erode and take the edges off the dust. The Moon has no atmosphere, so dust is spiky, like fiberglass. Mars dust is toxic with perchlorates.
Like where would the water come from. And soil. Do they not know soil is just millions of years of our dead ancestors and foods. It's just corpses and poop. Mars has got none of that
The most realistic part of the Expanse is how once travel to more easily habitable planets is possible Mars goes from being one the, if not *the* superpower in the Sol system to being a mostly abandoned rump state
Plus each human living in Antarctica has to consume four times as many calories as the average human living elsewhere, in order to cope with the cold. The necessary production would not be easy to scale up.
So if anybody needs a future-proof job, they should apply at Terraform Industries in Burbank, California. They are doing a gigantic job to keep earth habitable for us https://terraformindustries.com/
Imagine we devoted every resource available to the effort for 10 yeras, then 1 solar storm blows away the entire "atmosphere" we've been trying to create.
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It is IMPOSSIBLE to terraform Mars. Anyone claiming it can be is a grifting liar. Mars has no magnetic field because its core is dead. There is no way to re spin up its core. Without the magnetic field no atmosphere will ever hold there. Radiation will continue to bombard the surface.
Mars couldn't even be terraformed in The Expanse which is fiction and already had people living there.
Everything Leon does is a farce. He doesn't care about Mars. He cares about becoming the private arm for all of the government's space-faring missions. His goal is to destroy NASA.
Also, as a lunatic narcissistic billionaire autocrat who's rich it's easy to have smart people work for you because you can pay them like a lot.
When going to Mars with no way to return paying people loads of money might not be a good motivator to get the people you need for such an endeavor.
I don't think you'd take families because that would be triple the load with no added value. Also, who could stand his kid asking "are we there yet?" for maybe over a year? Why take then just to put em through the airlock half way
Haha, I meant left behind.
I can see the recruitment campaign now - go terraform Mars for future generations secure in the knowledge that your family back on Earth will be provided for* by ElonCorp.
*Ts & Cs apply. Any attempt to assert workers rights will terminate salary payments on Earth.
Nah, the main problem with Earth is that it’s being run by fuckwits like Elon Musk. We’d be much better off starting off from scratch on Mars where-Godammit, what’s this dumb cunt doing here?
Um just something to consider. Use of the word cunt as an insult is pretty misogynistic and body shaming for women, who already have a shit ton of that to deal with every day. Cunts bring life, pleasure, and are harmless - completely UNLIKE F*elon and his ilk.
Isn’t “cunt” an abusive term for all people, like “cock”? It’s not like calling someone a “pussy”, which I very often call out as abusive to something that’s actually quite great (per your arguments above), as well as assigning feminine traits as if negative (which is shit).
“Pussy” referring to a vagina most likely has the same root as the word “purse”. “Pussy” meaning “coward” is probably a reference to the timidity of a house cat. Although the evidence for both origins is scant.
Politely disagree. I could have called him a cock as well, likening people to genitalia is an age old insult in English, it is not gender specific at all. Also, I come from a culture where calling someone a “Good Cunt” is the highest praise possible (NZ).
It is mind boggling to me that people's first instinct wouldn't be to use (hypothetical) terraforming technology to fix climate change/carbon emissions instead. It's weird.
The whole "freedom cities" thing they're currently trying to push gives the game away, I think. The fantasy is really about claiming and molding new territory where he makes the rules because he controls all the infrastructure necessary for survival.
Right? They can’t even solve the problems we have now here on Earth. Easier to imagine themselves starting anew in a way that can’t be proven wrong until they actually do it & fail after wasting trillions.
As the Weinersmiths put it in “A City on Mars”. Compared to the most habitable conditions on the surface of Mars, the most inhospitable spot on Earth (middle of Antarctica, say) is like the Garden of Eden.
Great read!! "... Kelly & Zach Weinersmith’s book 'A City on #Mars' delves into whether the dream of settling new worlds could turn into a nightmare for both the pioneers & those left behind." https://newscientist.com/video/245904... #spacetravel #SpaceX #elonmusk #PipeDream #exploration vs. #colonization
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We’re not cutting healthcare to children, the elderly, our grandparents, our rural areas, our RED STATES, so Parasites like Musk can gain more govt funding!!
Fight the grift with 50501, & Indivisible
ACT
Their fear of death mentioned at the end also reminds me of a quote I recently saw that asks, "Do you want years in your life, or life in your years?"
But then so is trump.
The minds of their followers so easily manipulated.
And as such, i treat it differently.
“You realise if you undertake this mission you’ll never see your family again?”
“Fuck ‘em they never meant anything to me anyway”
*in our current format
Never mind all the stuff we *don’t know* we need like soil microbes in our guts or whatever.
(I just felt the need to agree in detail I guess)
The closest exosolar planet Proxima Centauri b at 4 light years away would take 54,000 years to reach.
https://bsky.app/profile/jeffvandermeer.bsky.social/post/3los6nky62s2l
https://www.orionsarm.com/fm_store/TerraformingVenusQuickly.pdf
it is not healthy to surrender to an inevitable death in an age that has eliminated smallpox and fed billions
Even a few hundred years versus 80 would be a massive boon I think most would take if actually given the opportunity.
even if i have to die eventually in the heat death, even just doubling my lifespan lets me get way further down my reading list
(and that's not to mention the potential *positive* societal effects of life extension, like people having personal stakes in preventing climate change)
I hope humanity eventually manages it, but *we* will not.
But at our modern tech level it's the pipest of dreams
Yes! Their lack of empathy allowed them to stomp on people to reach the top. Success came from barging in, not through intellectual superiority.
“The picture of
the world’s richest man
killing the world’s
poorest children
is not a pretty one.”
This is an important distinction…
1. They may find resources they can mine etc to make money and there are no environmentalists or laws there to stop them
2. They have already fucked up this planet with their greed and are looking to do the same elsewhere.
If they sell people on the fantasy of colonizing other planets, fixing the one we’re on isn’t important.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/11/a-city-on-mars-reality-kills-space-settlement-dreams/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHC85whh2A
News Alert: “President-elect Rizzler found dead after failed ‘drink paint challenge’. Markets in collapse.”
Some humans will make trips round Jupiter etc just because like a mountain, it’s there.
Kelvin was absolutely right. Airplanes were impossible in 1895.
https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/
Science does not say that living on Mars is impossible; only that it is really challenging.
https://youtu.be/BCX9YPAZa5A
He does have a death cult all the people he’s killing by cutting off the aid that we were giving to other countries and the poor and the starving
, and Oeter Theil all have Effective Altruism in common.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-18/effective-altruism-is-as-bankrupt-as-samuel-bankman-fried-s-ftx
He probably knows this, but since a habitat won’t be built in his lifetime, he feels he can get away with this nonsense.
Good thing that neither Musk nor SpaceX has any actual plans to send anything or anyone to Mars.
it will never have an atmosphere, or even oceans. The solar winds would strip them away.
He's a dope or a con man, no other choices.
If something is needed from mars, then the Martian orbit is there too.
Smaller volumes are easier to control, so why choose a massive atmosphere that can't be kept safe without massive amounts of constant maintenance.
And they conveniently think rich white people are most worth saving
(A: alleged time we have to the future.)
(B: what remains of today's population.)
It is, however, a great way to distract from all of the things Musk is doing.
Maybe 50 years after you start, you get your first big rock back.
But I also remember talk about how we were on the verge of a permanent lunar colony back in the ‘70s.
Which… *looks around* …yeah.
Or to put it another way, “We need the technology to live sustainably on Earth if we ever want to colonize another planet.”
The fantasy of a New Eden lives on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FsWcCwI6m8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHC85whh2A
Trying to terraform Mars while -oops! - Venusforming Earth is like a toddler applying to grad school. LAUGHABLY unqualified.
We *have* a planet that is already terraformed. Indeed: it terraformed *itself*.
Maintaining this world as habitable is easy mode.
It was originally proposed by scientists and similar back decades ago, before Musk even existed.
It is also the part that seems the most unachievable.
Hate to be a pessimist here, though, but I think warp speed is as realistic as global good will. The most fantastical part of Star Trek was that the human race got rid of money.
heh
:)
Interplanetary colonisation would force people to think about atmospheres as something you have to take care of.
Can't dump a ton of CO2 in your crew compartment.
Should we live other planets?
Nope.
End.
Nope, it will eat you.
I’m ok with that.
“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”
― Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
yeah, radiation is a problem. you solve it by sending an excavator and piling up some regolith overhead as shielding.
the real problem is, and always will be, that it cost trillions for no return on investment
Plus the enormous challenges of sustainable air and food. of course...
https://marspedia.org/Radiation_shielding
https://bsky.app/profile/jenlucpiquant.bsky.social
But don’t let me stop you MAGA.
The control case will be someone's Uncle Bob, who also makes dandelion wine in the potting shed.
Like, Mars has 1/10th Earth's mass and no magnetic field. How do you terraform that?
Easier to just build O'Neill space colonies.
But yes, O'Neill Cylinders would be easier.
"Compete with rival CEOs to make Mars habitable and build your corporate empire."
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/167791/terraforming-mars
Terraformed desert into a walled refuge for the rich once the rest of the planet becomes unlivable to the proletariat.
Though tbf, they seem quite unable to build that as well.
I know our atmosphere does a lot. I had the understanding it wasn't enough and that protection of the atmosphere wasn't the only thing the magnetosphere provided.
Like, Mars has an atmosphere now it’s just not enough to breathe.
But nobody is talking about colonizing the ocean floor because that's obviously not worth the effort.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/julia-watson-lo-tek-design-by-radical-indigenism-julia-watson/8159014
And, like, is that a thing? we could do? for Earth soil???
Still would be a terrible place to try to live.
Oh, or the bottom of the ocean.
(I still think we should explore outer space.)
https://givesendgo.com/Manarjad1989
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582
They've just cut money for a NASA sample return mission.
They can't even fund basic reconnaissance.
Everything Leon does is a farce. He doesn't care about Mars. He cares about becoming the private arm for all of the government's space-faring missions. His goal is to destroy NASA.
When going to Mars with no way to return paying people loads of money might not be a good motivator to get the people you need for such an endeavor.
I can see the recruitment campaign now - go terraform Mars for future generations secure in the knowledge that your family back on Earth will be provided for* by ElonCorp.
*Ts & Cs apply. Any attempt to assert workers rights will terminate salary payments on Earth.
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars
https://newscientist.com/video/245904... #spacetravel #SpaceX #elonmusk #PipeDream #exploration vs. #colonization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA