People talk about "saving humanity by moving to Mars" like the Earth is going to explode in 50 years or something.
The Earth is becoming more uninhabitable but it's because of people like Musk. We actually already have a perfectly good planet to live on.
Sounds like we can save humanity by sending capitalists into the cold vacuum of space
Why waste resources? We have perfectly functional firearms and ammo right here on Earth
Sounds like we're burning a lot of rocket fuel on this project, comrade. You're not secretly an Elon yourself are you?
One of the things that makes me sad is that it takes huge amount of energy to make something fall into the sun. I wish it was cheaper. It would be nice to play a game of interplanetary darts with Mercury as the bullseye and capitalists as the darts.
There is certainly an argument to be made for expanding. Humanity's chances of continuing to exist for x number of years improve drastically the moment there is a stable, self-sufficient group of humans on a completely different planet. It would mean we can no longer be wiped out by any single planetary catastrophe.
I think Mars is a dead end, though. Someone posted on here a while back about the concept of Venus colonies, up in the upper atmosphere. Those sound awesome, and they lack a few of the problems we'd face trying to colonize Mars.
Yeah, they actually have them in Wolfenstein reboot.
I think the idea is that they're built in a reasonably survivable area of the atmosphere. The ground is bad, but a few miles up is manageable.
I'd have to look it up again though. Basically read about it in passing a few years ago.
Venus is also more Earth-like as well in regards to size and mass. I suppose the benefit of Mars is that you're closer to the asteroid belt.
Yeah I remember it pretty well. I didn't know that about wolfenstein though, that's cool.
There's a NASA report about it (scroll to the bottom and hit the little pdf link)
Kurzgesagt has a nice video recently on terraforming Venus. What they fail to mention is that it would never happen under capitalism.
If you can terraform Mars you can terraform Earth without leaving it. It's silly.
-
Mars has a very thin atmosphere that wanes and increases with release of gasses from the ice cores on its poles. Even at maximum PPM, it's not breathable. It's also mostly CO2, and Mars indeed has a global warming issue from it. Mars would be colder if its atmosphere were nitrogen and oxygen instead. Mars can't hold an atmosphere if you were to somehow add one. It doesn't have enough gravity to sustain it on a geologic scale. You would have to replenish it ever so often. Now, is that a problem on a human lifespan? No. It's a problem on a "this is where people are going to live from now on" scale though.
-
Mars has cooled off too much under the crust. There's probably no active core or one not as active as ours. I think one of the recent rovers detected earthquakes, but this is from the planet cooling down more than active tectonic boundaries. So the core not moving fast enough means no magnetosphere, which means the surface is bathed in radiation. Living underground is a lot easier than hauling heavier building materials out of our atmosphere. So that means you have to do a lot of digging and it turns out that equipment is heavy too.
-
Mars probably has liquid water but it's very rare and concentrated at the poles in the form of ice. Water ice under CO2 ice, and I think a little bit of ammonia ice. So that's an issue.
-
Weird launch schedule built around orbits
Mars has lots of problems that aren't just solved because of fuck yeah science. Some of these problems could be helped by first doing them on earth and then trying to apply it elsewhere. But it's not economical to apply it on Earth. We're about to see that tested with climate change. If they can't get it together on Earth then why would they on Mars, an even more inhospitable place?
Not to mention there's no good power source. Solar won't work as well because you're further than the sun. Even with evidence of past life there probably isn't any amount of fossil fuel reserves. No or limited geothermal because the core is "dead". As soon as you run out of imported energy you're dead.
Your only shot is nuclear and mining asteroids, but entering and leaving the gravity well requires rocket fuel. You could make it from the ice at the poles, but that also requires tons of energy and dangerous industrial processes in an already inhospitable atmosphere.
Mars is maybe good as a small research base or stopping point for sending larger missions to other planets. I don't think it'll ever be profitable to do space stuff and any of this will need to be a collective societal drive that we all work for without an expectation of profit.
Elon fandom never fails to impress me with their stupidity even at the core premises
-
which is going to be easier: terraforming mars or making sure the earth doesn’t increase its temperature by 5 degrees
If I was gonna steel-man the counter argument, I'd guess I'd say the logic is that old habits die hard and actually confronting climate change on Earth requires human civilization retool it's entire approach the industrialization. Moving to some new planet, while technically harder work, is a "clean slate" so the speak. Since you're building from scratch you're not bogged down by a system that actually does "work" in the sense that it does what it's supposed to but needs to be reworked to be sustainable, you can actually just build what works all around from the get go.
It's like how, yeah technically it would be easy to just reorganize my room, BUT I'm a lazy fuck to the current chaos provides what I need, so if I REALLY want a cleaner room I gotta pull some dramatic stunt where I pull every single thing out of the room and throw half of it away and then reorganize all the furniture, and then my room will actually feel clean for like 3 months or so.
Science without materialist outlook is just a religion.
Ah yes, "scientist" Elon Musk. The science man who sciences things scientifically. Glad to know his shtick is doing rigorous research and publishing his findings in peer researched journals, and not at all gifting investors and governments to fund his wackadoodle brainfart vanity projects.
wow, that would be a crazy coincidence if it had any chance of happening!
I suppose he would probably only try to terraform earth if and only if he were allowed to own the entire thing as he expects to do with Mars
Imagine doing "terra forming" on something other than terra. Like really, imagine going through all the work of creating sufficient science and technology to change a planet and not using it to save the one you know can actually support life. The hubris of these chucklefucks is what really grinds my gears.
Holy shit the crises of capital have reached the point of "they say a wise science elder predicted the coming of the science Maud'ib (to save us from oblivion)"
