Small recommendation here which I saw recently is Werner Herzog's 2016 film Lo and Behold, which features Musk and all his mars stuff quite a lot! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the...
Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
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Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#22Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#23Between the realism about terraforming Mars and the strong likelihood that faster-than-light travel may never happen, is anyone else feeling a bit melancholic? It feels like a possible future has been taken away from us.
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#24Mars is only a few billion dollars of investment away from being quite habitable, and Mr. Musk should make plans to retire there along with his friends and senior execs within the year.
Perhaps we can organise a kickstarter?
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#25I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson said it best (paraphrasing): It takes less money and effort to fix Earth than to terraform Mars.
Classic Neil, always something smart-sounding to say about the wrong thing. It's more about discovery and adventure than fleeing a dying planet. To quote someone that I'm sure is Neil's intellectual superior, "¿Por qué no los dos?"
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#26Mars is only a few billion dollars of investment away from being quite habitable, and Mr. Musk should make plans to retire there along with his friends and senior execs within the year.
Imagine what you would say if they actually did so: invest (more than) a few billions in making part of Mars habitable by, say, building one of those 50's SF domes or something outlandish like that. Move there with their billions locked up in the new colony. Make it work, prove it actually was feasible. Manage to stay alive long enough to make the colony largely self-sustaining. Never mind the how, never mind the likeliness of it happening, just be John Lennon for a second and Imagine.
Those fat cats took their billions to create their own colony on planet X while we're left here on a dying Earth
Why should those greedy capitalists get their own planet? They should open it up to refugees from Earth!
Mars wasn't built by Musk & Co., it was built by $(insert_favourite_group) and belongs to them
Etcetera. Same old story, same old song. Quite a tiring one at that. I'd say let them have a go at creating a Mars colony and if they succeed - which is rather unlikely - they get to decide what to do with their settlement.
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#27Folks...The US is effectively bankrupt with a 40 Trillion dollars debt in case you did not notice. The US Treasury is just a few minutes away from an economic event, that will force the US government to spend more than 70% to 80% of tax revenues on servicing said debt.
There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars, much less colonize it. And with the current advances in robotics and automation there is nothing astronauts could do that a sophisticated robot team would not do better.
Many interesting Scifi stories show, that really advanced civilizations quickly lose interest in extended Space travel, and we should take the hint...
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#28It's always going to be easier to live underground or under the sea, and you don't see anyone doing that.
"To get to our habitat, you take a commercial flight to Bali, then a two-hour trip by boat" just does not have the same ring as "it's a six month trip in a space ship, but in a couple decades it might be as fast as 30 days". Being far away from everything is a major part of the appeal
If it's possible to call me back to the SF office for a client meeting the day after tomorrow I'm not going
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#29How about we just commit to fucking up one planet at a time? Arguably humanity is a dangerous invasive species that destroys any environment it inhabits.
Until we do better we should treat other planets more like a park than fresh real estate.
Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet
#30> We have to solve the problems we’ve created here before going anywhere off planet will become even slightly relevant. Which is a fair point, but the other points (about soil toxicity, cosmic rays and lower gravity) are all things that can be mitigated. Yes, it would be extravagantly expensive in per-human terms to house people on Mars. But the main reason for doing so -- that should something cataclysmic happen to…
The list of potential cataclysms on Earth for which being on Mars would be preferable to still being on Earth despite the cataclysm is pretty short. Mostly amounts to whole-crust-liquifying (way, way worse than the K-T event) asteroids. For just about everything else, earthbound bunkers would be better.
Mars is so bad that you have to turn all of the Earth's surface to lava before it's worse than Mars, basically.