My other hot take is, instead of spending 10 billion to terraform Mars they could undo the damage from deforestation and clean the oceans here on Earth
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The take is quite negative, why can't we have both? Also, while 10 billion is a lot of money, it's probably less than 10% of the budget required to clean the ocean. Even then, people need to stop polluting the ocean after its cleaned, that change is hard to just buy with money.
Do you know what it would take to terraform Mars? You need to STEAL a Jovian MOON (Europa would do), and redirect it into orbit around Mars. Over time, tidal forces would reheat the interior of Mars, and restart it's core. Once a magnetic field is established, it will retain atmosphere. GOOD LUCK.
Funding bans on single use plastics. More recycling plants in southern states. Funding climate education. Planting trees. Funding non-profits like 4ocean. Elon has more than enough to make a significant dent on climate change but he's relying on Trump's idea that it's a hoax to prioritize Mars
Seems easy to recycle until you realize that wood and paper are for many uses actually worse than plastic and there are thousands of kinds of plastic which you would need a chemist to sort.
Make less waste to begin with. No more .05 ounce earbuds in 15 ounces of packaging, for starters.
Those are great ideas in paper. I think to make any lasting changes our lifestyles need to be worsened, less and more expensive products and services, less fun. Not many will want that. Also why did Elon, Trump and the hate for billionaires enter this discussion.
Who else do you think is spending 10 billion to terraform Mars ? Not all ways to fight climate change would effect us directly. At the very least we should fund education for it so we have less people believing it isn't real. And billionaires shouldn't exist.
The decline of our own planet shows we can’t terraform Earth very well, let alone a more hostile planet like Mars. That being said, there are better ways to help the needy than to defund science.
It's shocking how hard it is for tech dipshits to realize that it is 1000000x easier to terraform earth to human optimal than it would be to do so on mars
By moving to Mars a selection can be made Who can go to Mars. While fixing earth means Everyone gets to be saved. Conclusion: they only want “some people” to survive
$10 Billion? Yeah, you need to add about 4 zeros to the end of that (conservatively.) And then, assuming someone figures out a way to re-establish a magnetic field, and we can find enough ice in the asteroid belt and get it to Mars, maybe it would work - after 250 - 350 years.
I really think that watching a bunch of billionaires spend like a trillion dollars to live like rats on Mars and then all get cancer in like 5 years could really do a lot for people's appreciation for life on Earth.
I imagine we will find a way to live successfully on other planets by learning how to fix and sustain this one. But there's a lot of people that want to skip to the end step too early and will pay the price.
There was a definite connection between being able to see the whole Earth for the first time and the birth of the environmental movement. Seeing how bad it sucks to live on Mars could have similar effect in modern times.
Jesus no. Let them go. The sooner the parasites are gone. The sooner we can turn where we live back into home. Oligarchs can’t help themselves. They are toxic. They will destroy mars as well.
Well I guess their logic is instead fixing our planet might as well cut our losses and move to a new one . Of course it doesn’t make sense but i suspect they wouldn’t be bothered doing it unless they feel that there is money to be made by doing it
Mars can't be terraformed because it is no longer has an atmosphere. Conditions inside the planet have changed so that it can no longer sustain an atmosphere. The little that it has is less than 1% the density of earth's atmosphere.
More so it has no magnetic field. It will be using any atmosphere anyone creates there very fast. There would need to be constant waste of a lot of money to pump more gases to form an atmosphere, every single year
It took hundreds of millions of years for the first atmosphere to be stripped down to what it is now. It would take an equally long timeframe for a new atmosphere to be depleted- even longer, because the Sun is now less active.
You’d need to warm the planet up, if only by a few degrees, so that the CO2 trapped in the permafrost and poles is released and further accelerates heating. That first step could be done with orbital reflectors, or the production of greenhouse gasses on Mars.
It doesn't have a spinning iron core like Earth does, so there's no magnetosphere to keep lethal solar radiation from reaching the surface. If these guys were serious about terraforming, they'd be shutting the hell up about getting there and starting with massive geological alterations.
And anything that would remotely come close would be a trillions / economy-of-earth for decades or centuries scale effort; $10B would be a drop in a bucket, which is criminal given the good it could do here and now
Seriously. We don't need to subject the rest of the universe to humanity. Maybe we just keep it on this planet till we collectively get our shit together.
Elon is turning out to be a bad dude (just like in . . . every story, ever) but he has lots of good ideas (genuinely different). If we don’t make it, someone else should, even if it has to be on Mars.
What a concept. Every other freaking day there’s another SpaceX launch here. All that money blown up to nowhere and then polluting our air and ocean. I don’t even go outside and watch them anymore.
They ain't gonna terraform shit. I could get into the logistics of how Mars just isn't habitable and to make it habitable would require manpower and tech capacity we don't have, but it's easier to say "the fat jackass who lies about everything lies about this too to grift"
You mean you wouldn't want to live on a cold dead world with nothing but desert and unbreathable air? Some billionaires have substantial wealth but no sense.
That's the scariest part ... It doesn't seem like he's interested in conserving our own planet with all its diversity and potential. He wants to create his own completely separate society under his full control. It was never about the future of all of humanity - just the parts he wants.
'Undo the damage from deforestation' has to mean 'use soldiers to kick small farmers off their plots of recently cleared tropical forest' - rewilding the Scottish Highlands doesn't move the needle - and *really* isn't something you want individual oligarchs doing!
Very true, but why didn’t the Harris campaign use at least half of their billion in donations to start doing *something* in this direction to set an example? Because they abandoned progressivism…
If they think they can terraform Mars for 10Bn, they're underestimating by roughly the same multiplier with which they overestimate their penis length.
Technology moving forward is a good thing for society. Remember Perhaps the 100's of millions(maybe billions when you add it all up) spent on political campaigns could be directed to something more useful such as the environment.
Unfortunately resources are being directed towards fueling political instabilities in various countries instead of funding something more developmental!!
Christ, they could end world hunger but their heads are so far up their egos they only focus on their perceived challenges, to leave some sort of twisted legacy.
LOL! It'll cost a lot more then 10 billion to terraform Mars. Musk has already wasted 100 billion just to build a rocket to get there faster. I did the math. Musk's idea to terraform Mars is simply a con job.
Ironic that the guy in charge of DOGE has been the biggest waste of Gov. grant money. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Or! We could take a long look at all of the broken treaties with my people the Wiyot and other North American tribes. The treaties in affect are in need of review as well. Hopefully my non profit and others like it can rescue our indigenous youth from what our ancestors and kin are suffering.
They don't care. They're billionaires. Their dream is to know they can exploit every last natural resource on earth to make a buck and be safe in a literal bubble on another planet, leaving the little people behind to suffer the consequences of their actions.
I think Elon likes robots and wizzy spacey things too much. Bugs and trees just aren't techy enough.
All we can hope for is that he leaves for Mars on one of his rockets, never to be heard of again.
It’s a grift. Those 1% MF always want to be in the “exclusive experience club”. For once, I saw fuck’em. Much like the Titanic undersea “overpriced experience”, this Mission to Mars shit will get them killed. I would never trust Muskrat, w/my life.
And then a giant meteor hits and we all die. Or a super volcano goes off and we all die. Or a nuclear war happens and we all die and irradiate the earth for eons. Don’t put all our eggs in on basket
You got that right! But that makes too much sense Lizzo! You know this next administration are climate change deniers. God forbid they help our planet first before they destroy another.
Makes so much sense. That’s why it’ll never happen 😂. Unfortunately we humans tend to do the opposite of what sense. It’s all fueled by greed in the end.
Terraform Earth! Nobody in their right mind wants to be dragged off to be thralls of the Elon Empire of Mars, never to be able to come home again. The hard facts of space and Mars are spelled out in #TheExpanse for great scifi horror. That’s not a lifestyle.
76,962,889 voters chose the decrepit, mentally declining psychopath billionaire who’ll die before he ever sees the catastrophic environmental damage he causes. Gen Z and Alphas will have so much to fix for the next 50+ years.
Our only hope is a Democrat supermajority in 2026 to stop the bleeding.
I don't think Musk or anyone else has any real intentions to terraform/colonize Mars. It's just another con he can delay indefinitely and collect government subsidies and manipulate the stock market. Musk is stupid but there's no way he's not aware how impossible all of this is currently.
That’s not an exciting California proposition. If it were, the act itself wouldn’t even be necessary. They would protect the environment from the outset.
Yeah, I’d absolutely choose that option if it were possible. Unfortunately $10 billion wouldn’t even make a mark on surface. That’s about three days of oil industry profit. They’ve been doing that much worths damage every three days for the last fifty years. Might fix three days worth of emissions.
Also, without a molten ferrous core to dynamo-power a magnetic field, any atmosphere generated by your terraformed photosynthesis on Mars, will just get blown outward by the solar wind to be caught by the gas giants.
Agreed. While I look at it from a technology perspective (computing), if I may, Big Tech building nuclear power plants to train their LLMs goes to show 1. How they disregard climate change and 2. Money that could've help with starvation, climate, etc.
Instead of giving up on Earth, they could stop poisoning her and make it beautiful again. But sure, a planet with no air, water, animals or grass - let’s focus on that 🤦♀️
It’s crazy cause when it comes to billionaires like him, we could take 99% of their money and they’d still billionaires. And for the ones that are barely in that category they’d still have 10s of millions of dollars.
We really don't need to send humans to exploit that rock. There is a major drone war playing out on earth right now, we can't make drones and remote vehicles that can dig? I'm sure that would be much cheaper.
Yeah but how will they get to claim earth and say they own it? There’s no one on Mars to refute their ownership claims. Besides Earth is so 20th century.
My hot take? Let em build it and when the billionairs are on Martian vacation at the swanky casino resort Drumpf, we strand them, cut communication, and reclaim Earth.
A clean ocean will not give you anything, but the opportunity to explore other planets and leave the Earth before the Sun engulfs us and before we exhaust all resources, is promising.
Oh, so we've fixed that pesky issue of Mars not having a proper magnetic field, have we? You know, the thing that's needed BEFORE you can try to create a brand-new atmosphere, which is BEFORE you can 'terraform' something.
Maybe we should fix THIS planet first ... it's far cheaper.
Exactly! I watched some physicist ramble on intelligently about how stupid it is to go to Mars. Cracked me up and made me wish I was on x so I could post it for Elmo! Why not reach a planet we could actually live on and enjoy living on?
But that doesn't let them set up a company store situation on Mars! Why deal with the devastation they've created here when they can run off and have full control over the lives of people they put they there?
(Sarcasm aside, I 100% agree with your hot take, but it requires them to learn empathy.)
And i dont think 10 billions is enough to terraform Mars anyway. Some organisation calculated the cost of martian terraformation as several trillions of dollars, while 10 billion dollars is enough to fix our problems here on Earth either way
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The bigger the brain, the colder that take is
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Make less waste to begin with. No more .05 ounce earbuds in 15 ounces of packaging, for starters.
The only humans who will ever MAYBE live on Mars will be billionaires who wouldn’t think once about the ones they leave behind
Both space exploration and minimising our impact here on Earth are important to our future.
They could have given up some of the money to do good. To improve the lives of everyone. Musk would have been hailed as a hero and respected.
But, instead he chose to be a greedy, despicable, hated villain.
It's down to us, really.
P.s we also have puppies and walruses
We need to get the Core active again*Nukes?
We would need to generate an Atmosphere...
That's just for starters.
But why not the Moon?
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Two things can be true at once. We can fund space exploration and address climate change.
The sad thing is we won’t.
Do both I imagine
Ironic that the guy in charge of DOGE has been the biggest waste of Gov. grant money. 🤣😂🤣😂🤣
All we can hope for is that he leaves for Mars on one of his rockets, never to be heard of again.
Our only hope is a Democrat supermajority in 2026 to stop the bleeding.
caused
Maybe we should fix THIS planet first ... it's far cheaper.
(Sarcasm aside, I 100% agree with your hot take, but it requires them to learn empathy.)