why are so many supposedly smart and rational people unprepared to confront the reality of what happens to a human body when they spend a significant amount of time outside the earth's magnetosphere
I kinda hope musk does get space colonisation going, all the most annoying people on earth will be the first to sign up.
Plus we'll get some great data about how their organs liquify, bones turn to dust, and dna turns into super cancer; we can use that data to stop it happening to normal people
A City on Mars does such a good job of outlining the reality of settling Mars. it would basically be human experimentation at best (a one-way ticket at worse) to send any amount of human beings there, much less an entire colony. how do you even have a baby on Mars? does anyone even care?
I’m a huge fan of Tang but it wasn’t worth the expense of feeding people, good infrastructure, general welfare. A lot of money for me to still not give a hot holy fuck about Jupiter.
Not even commenting on how it’s not even close to possible in our lifetimes, the fact that he’s involved with trying to kill so many agencies that would do research to help this goal is funny. But rocket go boom is the only thing he thinks that matters
I think this is a little bit uncharitable! I think the amount of time that space exploration nerds spend nerding out about radiation shielding suggests this isn't true
I mean, I definitely support musk using himself to Mars as soon as possible and bringing all his friends with him, and not just because I know the difficulties involved in getting there, surviving, it trying to get back, I think he can pull it off!
Smart but unaware of huge blind spots. Smart but live in a dreamworld dominated by their 13 year old fantasies of space travel and hot babes.
They aren’t grown ups.
I realize the following is ignoring so many other things that are dumb and shitty about him, but yeah, the guy who can’t even helm a social media site w/o it being insanely overrun by bots and just plain unpleasant to spend >five minutes on is somehow going to make ppl living on Mars a viable thing!
well also doing it at anything more than one-off scale probably requires being a Kardashev type 1 civilization or above and doing *that* probably requires not destroying industrial society via ecological catastrophe.
Humans will never thrive on Mars. Mars lacks almost everything humans need to survive. Any colony will have to bring pretty much everything they need to live.
It's colder than the coldest part of earth, and dryer than the dryest part of earth.
yeah i do kinda feel like many people don't consider that there's a whole ice continent here on earth that is way easier to get to and much more habitable and even that is harsh enough that it's mostly visited in short stints for scientific research and everyone lives in little pods
Indeed. I understand that people are theorizing about places humans could relocate to after an environmental apocalypse, but an environmentally devastated earth is still 1000x more supportive of human life than Mars.
I would love to see an exploration of Mars by humans, but it is not a retreat.
Everyone ignores the cosmic ray problem. High energy cosmic rays zip through the magnetosphere like it's not there. Only our atmosphere protects us from these dangerous rays.
Yeah, I've been a big space nerd for a very long time, but it just keeps looking worse for us meat sacks. We need gravity and a lot of radiation shielding, 2m of dirt or a magnetosphere and atmosphere (Mars has neither).
not enough people have watched the expanse bc this literally goes into the shit that will happen as well as the politically motivated starvation of water / air to people who live in space (very real scenario)
It'd be easier to fix the problems on Earth than it would be to fix the problems in space or on the other planets/moons in our solar system. By like, at least ten orders of magnitude.
It isn't *just* that the Martian soil contains a toxic level of perchlorates. It isn't "oh darn our nearest neighbor rolled the *toxic soil* quirk", it's that *anywhere we go could (and will!) have any of a million different versions of the same problem*
The "Goldilocks zone" is about liquid surface water but the Goldilocks concept (it can't be too much or too little, it has to be just right) applies so narrowly to so many different physical and chemical variables that *this is always going to be the only planet that works*
It's like you basically can't win; planet barren of life? You'll have to terraform it some way which is basically a godlike power. Planet has life on it? One of the greatest scientific discoveries ever but also nearly all of it and also the air will be incompatible with human biology
have you considered that the rule of law is also pretty cool and how much easier it would be on Mars to have you killed without any consequences if you miss your mining quota one week?
That is precisely the point of the fantasy to be white supreme overlord "manifest destiny" - and many folks who simp for it are quite nasty deep down, people who consider themselves "the ones who would make it"
Every theory about how life would be easier on [insert planet that isn't earth] is really just "I think it would be easier to design a sustainable society if I could kill about 8.5 billion people first" and that's the only reason anyone thinks Mars would be easier then earth.
its very cool how the very structure of our skeletal system relies on the strain its put under by holding up our bodies to maintain its shape. Very dialectical.
Like of all the nerd sci-fi fantasies, virtual reality, transhumanism, AI, etc. space travel is one of the least practical. But it's so prevalent in fiction that people have convinced themselves "sure, we're gonna colonize Mars in 20 years, and invent FTL travel this century".
they also don’t seem to get that the majority of data about space is coming from telescopes on earth rather than a rocket program that can only recreate achievements from the 60s
Never going to not drive me nuts that people will think like that instead of wrap their heads around and get mad at how Musk wants to be looked at like a real life Tony Stark and he literally could be by using his status as the richest man alive to save this planet, but instead he wants space toys
We should go to Mars orbit so we can pilot cool robots on the surface in real time for a while then come home. Under no circumstances should we be trying to live on it
I get that it speaks to the human spirit to go "we can explore anywhere and everywhere" but there's quite literally nothing more inhospitable to human life than space.
I genuinely believe it's because of science fiction. It's the same thing where you can know for a fact that you've never been in the Coliseum at the height of Rome's power but there's still a part of your brain that's pretty sure it knows what that looked like because you've seen Gladiator.
Yep, one of the consequences of floating around in zero G is after a while, you lose bone mass. Exercise helps reduce how much you lose, but you still lose some after a while.
They can also have significant autonomic nervous system dysfunction for a while after returning, due to the changes of atmospheric pressure on the body
climate change is going to chip away at civilization far faster than when we figure out how to generate magnetic fields strong enough to repel radiation at a scale small enough to deploy on a ship
it's okay though! never mind the life support issues, the colony studies, the technologies to actually build things there, the overall plans for anything, elon's decided what the government there is going to be like
"me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the isidis planitia to either die or prove a very important point" -drilon musk
Unironically: it's a colonization fantasy, half the people who are into it are into it because they read too much sci-fi but the other half are into it for the same reason zombie apocalypse enthusiasts are into their particular "ruling over the new world" fetish
All the excuses are "we need to prevent the human race from going extinct" but the fantasy is "I want to be a land baron on Martian Libertalia where indentured laborers will toil in the mines and I can make the age of consent whatever I want because I control the oxygen supply"
Musk definitely just wants to be slave emperor of Mars. Like the only two things he’s actually said about going to Mars are “Earth law will not apply” and indentured servitude for people who want to go but can’t afford it. He has no plan to make it happen.
it's *super* colonialist too. like, it uses the phrase "manifest destiny to the stars" and i just have a feeling in my gut that some people in silicon valley have read this weird, weird book.
if you haven’t done a deep dive into the delusional sci-fi slop a notable amount of these silicon valley tech dweebs believe they’re destined to bring forth, i’d recommend starting here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
start a 3,000 year project to rehabilitate a planet with a dead core that gets nixed 7 years in when the profit margins on an excel spreadsheet invert and the CEO opens the airlocks to triage losses
Eh we've had artificial gravity with centripetal force figured out since the 60s. We've never tested it on a human scale cuz special exercise can overcome negative health effects for the relatively short timeframes we've been doing human spaceflight with so far
If you like Musk because he's a right wing troll, whatever, at least you're being honest about his skillset. By far the dumbest Muskites are the people who still think he's some kind of space genius.
Why are these smart and rational people unable to clock that he’s the dumbest fucking thought leader we’ve ever had? He’s just an idiot frat boy with a Boer accent, an irresponsible amount of money and a thesaurus so he sounds educated
Even if we solve that problem (lol) we’re still talking about environments where the slightest thing going wrong means instant death. Like the OceanGate sub writ large
Nearly everytime an ESA guy (or even a guy interested in doing stuff in Mars) talks about doing stuff on my department, they always refer to Mars as a stillbirth , where even "long term" just means shoving more robots to shoot beams for CO2 so they get away from as fast as possible.
They also don't want to accept that in order to colonize a second planet we have to save this first one here and if we can't do that...bad news. Furthermore, it can take anywhere between a decade to a century to de-extinct a plant species or restore biomes. Mars will take centuries we don't have.
I had this general theory that a zillionaire working on this was a sort of least-bad sink for their $. Like how Larry Ellison spends bank on yachts, but this might solve some real problems like previous space programs.
Unfortunately, what we got was way worse than Tang [1]. :|
just posted about this…apparently “equal rights” & “it would be cool if we distributed our limited resources with some amount of equity & ecology in mind” are totally unrealistic goals, but fucking off to a cold, barren rock with no atmosphere is “imperative for humanity”
I’m pretty sure there are some very smart people thinking about this right now. Personally, I wonder if we are going to “occupy Mars” why haven’t occupied the moon yet? The only people who have stepped on the moon are a handful of American astronauts.
At the height of the Apollo program, we spent 4% of the Federal budget on NASA. That would be $240 billion. SpaceX had revenue of $8 billon, a full $3 billion was wasted on profit (a thing government agencies don't do).
In what sense can the government not afford to explore space?
Talking about humanity's future amongst the stars is deeply childish and toy-brained behavior. Oh yeah I plotted out the golden path of the human race and it terminates in a place that looks remarkably like what I was making my action figures do 30 years ago.
rory blank perfectly captured this on a shirt (this is the only image of it i could find, don't buy from this site, it was a limited run shirt just from rory)
“space is exhilarating” These teenage boys in adult bodies have no idea about anything. Also Mars isn’t space, it’s another planet, one without water or air. Ex-something!
One of my favorite recent moments was when Shatner got a chance to go up and came back absolutely terrified of space, saying how it's so black and cold and Earth is all we've got.
But geez, even Star Trek makes it a point to show how terrifying and dangerous space is.
Also? The government is helping to fund SpaceX. And also? One of the reasons Musk can fund out of pocket (assuming he does) so much is because the government doesn't tax the super wealthy enough so that the government can fully fund theoretical and applied science. And finally also...
Or maybe there are people who see value in a collective project of exploration, scientific advancement, and working together to overcome what are currently viewed as intractable problems.
Should we stop exploring the ocean because some billionaire dolts imploded themselves?
Elon Musk is bad and stupid. He should not be the one heading up projects such as this. This doesn't mean every project related to the exploration of space should be tossed out.
I'm with Sams-Culottes. There are people who's work will benefit generations to come. Space exploration doesn't fascinate me, but there are people who are trying to look out for humanity. Not everyone should be concentrated only on current issues.
The Expanse solved this problem! (you just have to constantly have a cocktail of designer drugs pumped into you and if you stop then you die of turbocancer)
The Expanse did a lot of things right, maybe the most important of which was knowing when to just shrug, attribute something to magical future technology, and move on.
Star Trek series is too communist and not sufficiently action-packed, they are more into cyberpunk (but corporations good, actually) or Star Wars (completely apolitical, don’t you dare compare the stormtroopers to nazis, or the good guys to the Viet Cong).
I wish more people would listen to Shatner "It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white, and I realized one was death and the other was life."
I've read similar sentiments from astronauts, but there's significance when it's coming from a notoriously vain actor whose most famous line is "space: the final frontier." Everything good that has ever happened, happened on Earth.
Like every science fiction work of art has to invent a new valuable substance to motivate space travel. We already have sand here! There’s nothing on Mars worth bringing back!
fr!!! we’ve studied it!! anyone coming back from the space station will talk about it! and then ppl who i guess are so bad at understanding science that they can’t even grasp that other people can know things they don’t are like “but i wanna” ?? that’s not how being alive works
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Plus we'll get some great data about how their organs liquify, bones turn to dust, and dna turns into super cancer; we can use that data to stop it happening to normal people
Smart but unaware of huge blind spots. Smart but live in a dreamworld dominated by their 13 year old fantasies of space travel and hot babes.
They aren’t grown ups.
The thing about Musk putting people on Mars is that the *best case scenario* is a bunch of folks living in a company town beholden to rich sociopath
It's colder than the coldest part of earth, and dryer than the dryest part of earth.
In fact it's cold as hell
I would love to see an exploration of Mars by humans, but it is not a retreat.
- I do hope we get permanent outposts going
- those outposts will 100% turn their occupants DNA to jelly
- I think there are people who will go for long durations despite the risks
- they gon die (hopefully doing something they care about)
It isn't *just* that the Martian soil contains a toxic level of perchlorates. It isn't "oh darn our nearest neighbor rolled the *toxic soil* quirk", it's that *anywhere we go could (and will!) have any of a million different versions of the same problem*
At this point, I think they're actually delusional.
This article from William Shatner always trips me up. Even though I love Sci Fi it's folly to abandon the earth and think our salvation is in space
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/
This seems to suggest the dose rate is ~0.5mGy/day unshielded which accounting for the weighting factors works out to ~4mSv/day.
That’s not great, but also not terrible as far as I understand. You wouldn’t get sick. It ads ~7% relative risk of cancer per year.
This suggests for Mars missions unshielded dose rates are more like 1.5mSv/day.
It’s plausible that such low rates aren’t as bad as typically suggested, & a foot of water’d reduce it by 10+x.
What’s your major cause for concern here besides CMEs?
Fixed. 💚
Where does he think that money is coming from?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL
I'll give you the other two though
Unfortunately, what we got was way worse than Tang [1]. :|
[1] Pretty bad tbh
https://bsky.app/profile/mendtimes.bsky.social/post/3lbb47ylxg22b
In what sense can the government not afford to explore space?
But geez, even Star Trek makes it a point to show how terrifying and dangerous space is.
Elon Musk is bad and stupid. He should not be the one heading up projects such as this. This doesn't mean every project related to the exploration of space should be tossed out.
And Musk isn't just any bigoted Megalomaniac, he has his own satellites, he's a James Bond level villain
For the older crowd of space enthusiasts, letting go of Mars is a massive letdown. They saw the moon landing and craved more - understandably so.