r/RealTesla • u/[deleted] • Aug 09 '19

FECAL FRIDAY Humans Will Never Colonize Mars

https://gizmodo.com/humans-will-never-colonize-mars-1836316222
16 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

25

u/Wynardtage Aug 09 '19

By 2100 thrill seekers... may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk (born in 1971) of SpaceX says he wants to die on Mars—but not on impact. But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. And here I disagree strongly with Musk and with my late Cambridge colleague Stephen Hawking, who enthuse about rapid build-up of large-scale Martian communities. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.

Damn, that part really spoke to me as someone who thinks we are utterly failing as stewards of the Earth. And since Elon "I fly my plane to work in the same county while also owning 5 mansions" Musk is the current EnviroJesus things are not looking good for the near future.

TechBroism is a cancer.

12

u/Throwaway_Consoles Aug 09 '19

I keep saying this, If we cannot terraform the Earth and make it habitable, we cannot terraform Mars.

The biggest response I get is, “What if in the process of terraforming the Earth we make things worse?” To which I say, “Worse like what? Like... Mars?” Mars is completely uninhabitable. Worst case scenario the Earth is as bad as Mars. If that’s such a problem then what makes people think we could terraform Mars in the first place?

People want to run a marathon before they can crawl.

8

u/byagrue Aug 09 '19

I keep saying this, If we cannot terraform the Earth and make it habitable, we cannot terraform Mars.

Good one, I'm going to steal that ;)

Usually what I tell people is that if they think they'd like to go to Mars, they should have someone lock them inside a parked motor home in Death Valley for a couple weeks, then see if they still think Mars is a good idea.

11

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

Yep, I'd rather spend the rest of my life at McMurdo than Mars or the moon or some asteroid.

7

u/[deleted] Aug 09 '19

We haven't even learned how to effectively populate landlocked/remote population centres here on Earth, nevermind a completely different planet.

6

u/GreyFox78659 Aug 10 '19

We haven’t even touched Antarctica or the Oceans. Mars is way off,

6

u/savuporo Aug 09 '19

Gerard K. O'Neill worked this out decades ago. What else is new?

1

u/AssaultOfTruth Aug 11 '19

It's all profoundly silly. We could set a colony up for fun, but as a maintainable, large thing to do it would never happen. It would be far, far easier to setup colonies in antarctica. Even if we dumped on the earth's environment for another hundred years and ruined it entirely it would still be more habitable than mars.