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Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

newscientist.com

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Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#71

Post by triceratops »

doublerabbit wrote: post #60
triceratops wrote: post #23

Between 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.

To me the future was taken away from us in 1997. That's when my teenage life turned from fun to depressing. Web 2.0 turned stinking because of Facebook and everything cool turned unified. Apple and Google are both wet teabags that ultimately own the walled gardens we can't escape. Want to go somewhere else? Take the Cloudflare tunnel. Whatever the Y2K bug was suppose to be never happened and we've been stuck in the g…

First off, and I'm very sorry to do this, "should of" is never, ever right.

Second we couldn't have LLMs in 2006. In fact I'm not sure we could've had them without the massive amount of user-generated content that came from Web 2.0, including Facebook. Reddit, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow are big sources of training data.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#72

Post by inaros »

wongarsu wrote: post #52
inaros wrote: post #27

Folks...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 n…

Our Mars robots are awesome, but they take years to accomplish what astronauts could do in days. Our latest and greatest model (Perseverance) has traveled 40km (25mi) in 5 years, with the support of a scout helicopter. Which is more than what Curiosity managed in 13 years. But that's approximately what they did in Apollo 17 in five hours. Granted, Apollo 17 didn't make quite as many stops to analyze rocks, but it sho…

Those robots were designed 20 years ago... You can send now a whole swarm of humanoid robots, that would recharge 24x7 out of a KRUSTY Reactor [1], you did not even had LLMs then.

[1] - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20205009350/downloads/03...

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#73

Post by wongarsu »

inaros wrote: post #46
stronglikedan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

I know deGrasse is apparently in private, a bit of a ahole, but in this case he is completely correct: https://youtu.be/t0Yqy_-PCfY https://youtu.be/IdjtK54Lprw?t=266

That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#74

Post by triceratops »

jubilanti wrote: post #70
triceratops wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good futures, sure. But not as cool . No Tannhauser Gate, no Kessel Run.

You know what's cool? Lifting a billion people out of poverty on earth. If you don't think so and still are more motivated by space opera fantasies, there is something wrong with your morals.

You don't know me or what motivates me. You're crossing into personal attacks and that's not ok.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#75

Post by Tadpole9181 »

glenstein wrote: post #65
b112 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no scientific or economic case to even go to Mars Nonsense. Just going to Mars with humans creates economic activity, and the R&D to do so, adds to scientific knowledge. If you want to argue against going into further debt to do so, well, that's a different argument. One I agree with.

Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle. One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we sho…

Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#76

Post by jubilanti »

triceratops wrote: post #68
jubilanti wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An improbable future was sold to you as probable. Why attack the people calling BS for taking away a BS fantasy? If you actually admire science and not science fiction, you should be glad when you are confronted with overwhelming reasons why your priors are wrong. Why is improving life on earth for the billions here in poverty not a worthwhile fantasy? Why does that noble goal not sustain you in the way space operas…

I didn't attack anyone. You might want to re-read what I wrote. I can be glad to have a truth but also dislike that truth.

Well that's how I read "has been taken away from us." When you use the language of theft, what else am I supposed to think? You are asserting a damage has been caused by calling BS and not by the BSers.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#77

Post by AngryData »

triceratops wrote: post #23

Between 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.

If we solve fusion to the point where it is easy in a relatively light reactor or manage to "safely" contain significant amounts of antimatter, it is possible to travel the stars by maintaining 1g acceleration for years or decades. But of course maintaining 1g acceleration for even just an hour, not to mention years, while theoretically possible, is still so far outside of practicality that I don't expect to see any practical plans for it in my life time.

The only currently feasible solution currently is to ride a wave of sequential nuclear bomb explosions, but that is far from ideal.

So the possibility still exists, current physics is a big obstacle to challenge, but is not a solid barrier preventing our expansion in the far future.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#78

Post by pavel_lishin »

flenserboy wrote: post #63
pavel_lishin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that toe-hold actually survive without constant resupply vessels? There's cheaper ways to doom a dozen people to a slow, inevitable death.

not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.

That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#79

Post by simonbarker87 »

glenstein wrote: post #49

Currently reading Blue Mars, the third and final book in the trilogy. It's amazingly fascinating but also exhausting. I say with full seriousness it may be best to read this with a very specific high resolution full color map of Mars on your wall somewhere. If anything KSR is not giving himself as much credit as he deserves, as personal AIs show up in ways that are remarkably salient and similar to what we're current…

Good on you, exhausting is the right word I’d think. Red Mars was the book that killed my enthusiasm for reading for nearly a year. Something about it bored me to tears and yet, I kept reading (my fault) I think I gave up at 60%.

I feel like I should like it, I’ve read everything my Neal Stephenson so I’m not averse to hefty books

Re: Author of Red Mars calls 'bullshit' on emigrating to the planet

#80

Post by guzfip »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #75
glenstein wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. At a bare minimum it's a hedge against terrestrial existential risks. And if Mars itself sucks, then, well, rotating space stations with simulated G, same principle. One terrible thing wrought by billionaire Mars fantasies is a backlash that I think has become too sweeping. It's wrongheaded for a million reasons, but it's nevertheless true that hedging against terrestrial existential risks is something we sho…

Sorry, I'd love to hear exactly how a mars habitat with a half dozen people or a space station are "hedges against terrestrial existential risks"? Those are both "unfriendly" environments that lack the resources required to sustain themselves for any appreciable amount of time. And certainly don't have the number of people required to repopulate.

If I’m to believe the experts, LLMs are a panacea to all problems to have ever existed, like Blockchain before it.

Therefore it is a non-issue as given that LLMs have only gotten exponentially more impressive, in [current_year+n] you will be able to prompt Claude to materialize a fast terraforming machine and FTL it over to mars.

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