Fries is just as confident about the eye-watering price Musk wants for a trip to Mars. “I’m slapping down my hundred grand as soon as that fortune a Nigerian prince left me arrives. The future is so bright, I need sunglasses.”
Fries is just as confident about the eye-watering price Musk wants for a trip to Mars. “I’m slapping down my hundred grand as soon as that fortune a Nigerian prince left me arrives. The future is so bright, I need sunglasses.”
It’s the ultimate rich person fantasy: travel to another planet, colonize it, and make your own goddamn rule. That’s what this is all about: some culture war bullshit.
Mask wants to live on Mars so he can say “what I said isn’t considered racist on Mars!“ And pretend to have some validity. Because then he’s an idiot like that. So are a lot of extremely rich people who are also very racist, but don’t want other people to know that.
That is why the dream of Mars is so appealing to a lot of people: for the same reason that Christianity is: because it gives a “get out of jail free card” to people who are absolute pieces of shit, but if they’re rich enough and or say the correct arrangement of magical words, they will never have to face the consequences for it.
These people actually believe this bullshit.
Quite frankly, for some maybe, but for many mars proponents, no, not really.
This characterization is popular online because Elon is a self centered asshole, but you can also reach the conclusion that mars colonization is an idea worth seriously considering, based just on looking at Earth’s history.
Like there are numerous mass extinction events, from super volcanos, to asteroids, to cosmic bursts that could wipe out life as we know it in basically an instant.
And the earth as a whole only has about 1.3 Billion years before the sun makes it uninhabitable.
But it took life on earth about 2.9 billion years just to evolve into multi-cellular organisms.
Humans took hundreds of millions of years since the dinosaur extinction to evolve to our modern intelligent form.
And the earth is the only place in the universe that seems to have any life whatsoever.
If we care about preserving intelligent life, or if even if you just care about preserving life in general, there’s a strong argument to be made that we should colonize other planets at some point, as a contingency plan if nothing else.
Does that mean it necessarily needs to happen right now? No, but if you are open to the idea that it’s a necessary contingency plan, then why not start now? The counter argument is usually one of opportunity cost, like we have enough problems on earth to solve, but that’s kind of a nonsense argument because we already have enough resources to solve our problems on earth. We waste them incessantly so we don’t, but space exploration is a lot less of a waste than most of our leisure pursuits.
I care about preserving life on Earth. I think we can make it on Earth, and If we can’t make it on Earth I’m somewhat disinclined to pollute the stars with this stuff.
Is it polluting the stars if there is literally no other life out there?
It may be way way rarer to get the exact right mix of chemical cocktails + environment to create anything remotely resembling life. The literal entire rest of the universe may just be interesting abstract science experiment worlds. If that’s the case, why do you care about “polluting” it with life? Without life to take interest in them, they’re just abstract systems that will operate until the heat death of the universe when they won’t.
All other earthlike planets (and I’m presuming we’re only really intending to go to those) are planets that perhaps will support life in a billion or a trillion years. But that is exactly the kind of experiment that won’t happen if we start sending our own lifeforms at them.
Be able to support life, or actually spontaneously create and support life?
Because right now, from everything we know about Mars, there seems to be extremely little chance of life ever being able to evolve before the Sun’s aging makes it uninhabitable by anything.
How will we know if there is indigenous life on Mars if we contaminate Mars. Indeed, we might have done this already.
I think you missed the part about extinction level events. The kinda thing a single planet is prone to.
Hasn’t Mars already had its extinction level event when it lost an atmosphere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
Surely it makes more sense to prevent extinction level events occurring in the first place!
Though I think in general terms humanity living on other planets is a good thing.
What evolution will humans need to do to reach mars? None, it’s all technology; 1.3 billion years is a long time when you consider humans and space flight is just 2.5 million years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution
A likelier fantasy is to con people into giving money for projects, and/or con Musk into thinking it is possible so they can sell him stuff.
Going to Mars? Humans haven’t gone to the Moon in over 50 years, and that was after JFK and LBJ spent much on NASA.
I believe that is a factor, who wouldn’t want to rule their own little kingdom? And nobody wants that more than a jerk that thinks they are better than everyone
But really I think it’s gold rush style greed. Whoever gets a settlement on Mars will want to make it a truck stop to help anyone trying to explore deeper reaches of space and make ridiculous money for a long, long time
If you can assemble and launch rockets on mars instead of Earth you can do waaay more because you’re only fighting 1/3 of gravity for each launch so you get more fuel/cargo/range
That’s exactly it, all these astronaut wannabes just want to go to Mars to say the N word.