Good luck with that 96% carbondioxide atmosphere chief
preserving civilization by replicating the exact structures that destroyed the Earth on a less resource-rich and hospitable planet
u mad that capitalism has made morons like elon musk the 2nd richest man in the world and given him millions of fans who think he's a genius?
It really is easier for people to imagine the end of the world, or the terraforming of a lifeless desolate planet, than to imagine the end of capitalism.
When they test space vehicles like rovers, they do so in the deserts of the southwest with similar topography. Absolute inhospitable hellscapes that barely simulate the real thing, but the best we can do on this planet.
Musk should have to do that. Build a colony in rural Arizona using only the materials you can bring in a spaceship-sized load with Mars-length resupply cycles. Make it self-sustaining in every way for a population that won't face genetic bottlenecks. Bring an animal and feed it. Keep that population alive on hydroponically-grown food using machines that can't be repaired or fertilised without a resupply ship. Colonists can go outside, but only in full Mars kit and only using Mars surface exposure protocols. The colony has to survive for ten years and to make it easy they're physiologically on Earth so it won't cause chronic health issues or stress machinery beyond Earth conditions. If at any point anyone wants to live or is injured beyond what a remote colony can deal with, knowing that we have to medevac sailors from ships if they develop a wisdom tooth infection, the only way they can leave is by waiting for the next ship after the colony constructs a launchpad and enough fuel to escape Mars orbit.
I don't care if they succeed or not, I just want Elon Musk to suffer Rimworld.
You should pitch that to Netflix. Elon would never agree to do it but it never hurts to try. I would watch the fuck out of that.
They did something like that back in the 90s build a biosphere and it failed miserably. They had to eat their seed stocks, they had severe crop failure which required them eating an emergency supply of food just to survive, when leaving the experiment they were all rather emaciated. There was substantial strife with 2 distinct factions rising up. They couldn't supply enough oxygen so they then started pumping oxygen into the place. Sure technology has advanced a fair bit over the past few years, but this shows a substantial problem where even on earth in a very large facility designed to be rather comfortable with help immediately available, that basically everything that could go wrong, did. The fucking man doesn't even think cosmic or solar radiation is a problem.
Yes, Biosphere 2. A viable small closed ecological system is still the stuff of science fiction.
https://archive.curbed.com/2019/7/11/20686351/what-is-biosphere-2-curbed-podcast-nice-try
Great one-off podcast on it from the Serial folks.
Apparently, harvesting potatoes (their primary food stock) produced carbon dioxide gas, which slowly drove down the supply of breathable oxygen. Not only were they emaciated at the end, but they were asphyxiating themselves, to boot.
Great experiment and it yielded a ton of useful data. But it's highly illustrative of the hurdles we've yet to clear.
But rather than building a Biosphere 3 and improving our attempts at creating a human sustainable terrarium, we seem to insist on playing at space colonist entirely within our minds.
I thought that Bud and Doyle were able to help the scientists restore the ecosystem after they threw that rager in the desert. Doesn't seem like that much of a failure to me.
lmao wikipedia says Steve Bannon managed the project, and the scientists were concerned because he had a reputation for jeopardizing the safety of scientists in other projects
Leading managers of Biosphere 2 from the original founding group stated both abusive behaviour by Bannon and others, and that the bankers’ actual goal was to destroy the experiment. During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs, Abigail Alling, a "self-centered, deluded young woman" and a "bimbo." He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint "down her throat." Bannon attributed this to "hard feelings and broken dreams." At the end of the trial, the court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered Space Biosphere Ventures to pay them $600,000, but also ordered the plaintiffs to pay the company $40,089 for the damage they had caused.
Elon Musk to suffer Rimworld
Yeah it would be great if he got mauled to death by a turtle
It's cool how we're just okay with this middle schooler being god emperor of Mars.
Let him delude himself that he's ruling that uninhabitable lethal rock if that suits his fancy. Time spent playing emperor and inventing fancy titles is time not spent union busting.
im okay with it because because mars is not a place where people live nor will people live there within any of our lifetimes
On the other hand no one actually lives on Mars making it fair game
This is cringe revisionism, comrade. Why do you think it's called the Red Planet :posad: :posadas: :possadist-ufo:
At this point in time, terraforming is nothing but a sci-fi fantasy.
Like it's literally impossible even if we had a warp drive or whatever and could build the shit on Mars without the logistics of getting there.
Also how the fuck you gonna terraform Mars when you can't even terraform Earth? Do they just think consumption of nature and humanity is terraforming? I got news for you, there's none of that on Mars.
Right? If terraforming was possible, climate change would be irrelevant. Just reverse it using the same technology.
I wouldn't call it totally impossible, just impossible under capitalism. Terraforming isn't a good solution for climate change though, it's too slow to reverse the massive damage we've already done. In order to reverse climate change we simply need to cease CO2 producing activities. Any terraforming we'd do would just produce more CO2 than it could absorb.
Terraforming is typically thought of as occurring over much longer time scales, like centuries to millennia. It takes a communist society to commit to a project like this where there is no immediate short term profit. Terraforming Mars is an admirable goal to have, but only after we get our shit together here on Earth.
In order to reverse climate change we simply need to cease CO2 producing activities
That is likely too late to work as many feedback loops are likely to have already been triggered, or will be due to the eventual heating from the CO2 we already emitted.
Yeah there's definitely a ton of damage baked in. I guess by reverse, I really meant to say eventually stop. It'll take time for the temperature to stop rising even after we quit pouring CO2 into the atmosphere. But still, that is pretty much the only tool we have beyond something drastic like filling the upper atmosphere with light reflecting particulates.
Yeah, I'm not saying it's impossible, but you can't have it in an economic mode of production that requires the destruction of nature to function.
Not fucking up a planet that is capable of sustaining life is literally infinitely easier than keeping things alive on a dead rock.
Those things are just going to be in little geodome things on Mars, anyway. So basically museum pieces, not a sustainable population. But why would he care.
Because of mars's low gravity, any atmosphere we manage to create would inevitably evaporate, and it would become devoid of resources forever. I'm glad a capitalist with an 11-year old brain who can't see further than the next quarter is allowed to decide that we should exploit an entire planet
That's not quite correct. Mars has a a decent amount of gravity, the bigger problem is that it lacks a magnetosphere which causes the solar wind to strip off the top layer of the atmosphere (and this is made worse by the lower gravity). Despite that it can still hold on to the gases we need for millions of years, the atmosphere stripping process occurs on a geologic scale. So this is a solvable problem, it's just a bad idea to actually invest resources in it. Maybe in a few hundred years...
surprised musk hasnt tried to sell us planetary scale jumper cables to restart the martian core
We'll get some of the way but deporting L. Ron Musk there. He's quite dense.
I'm still mystified over the Mars thing. I admit I don't understand the science behind it much, but serious articles I've read said that Mars can't really ever be inhabitable, or if it could be, it would take resources and a time scale that are completely beyond us in our current predicament here on earth.
it was a big deal when we got a little rover to land on it a few weeks ago lmao that should tell you enough how far away we are from anything more
Easy mode: slightly adjust almost perfect atmosphere
Hard mode: totally alter an inhabitable planet's atmosphere.
It's not that complicated folks.
I do wonder where Musk is gonna magic up a whole-ass magnetic field for Mars so it isn't constantly bombarded with hazardous solar radiation that has been hitting the surface for so long that the planetary soil literally gives you cancer
as we are failling to keep a planet that has a perfect ecosystem for us alive: "I AM SURE WE CAN JUST GO TO THIS LESS HABITABLE PLANET AND BE FINE"
Whatever we do to fuck up earth, fixing that is going to be several orders of magnitude easier than making Mars inhabitable.
Someone incept the idea into Elon Musk's mind that he should ride one of his Tesla cars driverless across the United States to prove how reliable they are.
