131–140 of 1001 posts
What are we going to do on Mars? Live in a plastic box? Send in a bunch of slaves to mine minerals in insufferable conditions? I don't get it.
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I wrote a long essay about this that I have yet to publish, but my basic point is this: 1. Mars is a fucking desert. There is no air, water or life. 2. Venus is covered in CO2 clouds and sulfuric acid rain. Metal melts on its surface. We are not going to live in space. To even WANT to live in space is an absurd fantasy that is in violent conflict with the reality of space as an airless, inhospitable, largely resource…
We need to live in space because having all human life on one planet is intrinsically unreliable. However lucky we get, every year there is a tiny chance that we are all killed by anything from an asteroid impact to global climate change. No matter how small that chance is, what it means is given enough time, eventually this planet will no longer be host to humans. We need to branch out to other planets before that h…
This is a false equivalence. Birds fly; they do not live on Mars.
>the Earth was an inhospitable wasteland.
The Earth did not become hospitable through human effort, as is required if we are supposed to live on Mars.
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This brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?
Some possible reasons; Mars has a c02 atmosphere, water ice, it has a ~24 hour day as opposed to the moons 28 day-day, Earth and Mars have similar sizes.
SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
"The video appears to show SpaceX's new rocket — the BFR, or "Big Fucking Rocket" — as well as the company's interplanetary spaceship — the BFS, or "Big Fucking Spaceship.""
I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here. One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of "Tomorrow's World" and "Horizon" telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I'm a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Comman…
This brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?
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What about going to a different planet makes you think we won't just be taking those same problems with us? The earth isn't the problem - The problem is the human brain. We aren't genetically capable of processing the world we have built. Expect there to be Trump IV vs Clinton IV 2117 hosted live on Mars if we haven't made significant improvements in human engineering.
The problems we take with us aren't the problem this project addresses---there is one problem we unequivocally leave behind if we successfully colonize Mars. For all our accomplishments, the human species is one unavoidable planet-scale disaster away from total extinction. We know this class of disaster has happened in Earth's past, and we know we lack the capability to stop it. Colonizing Mars gives the species that…
Going to Mars fixes none of these problems however and wastes a lot of energy in the process.
God, my lifetime would be so boring if it wasn't for people like Elon.
It looks from the videos that the boosters return to land using strictly thrust from the rocket. Can someone explain why it's done that way and a parachute isn't used for at least part of the descent? Seems like an awful waste of fuel.
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Watch the end of the video. I think he intends to terraform it. Edit: looks like he's aiming for a city of 1m people in the short term, Terraforming in the long term.
We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example), but believe we'll be able to terraform a planet to which we haven't even been able to send a human yet?