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

You're saying you never, ever, not once thought interstellar travel and space colonies might happen one day. Far into the future, of course.

My dream of interstellar travel died once I grew up a bit and learned about relativity. But colonies in our solar system and the rest are dead because of money more than anything else.

Maybe should is wrong, but my life turned to hell since then. My digital joy was taken away from me. Nothing has moved on, it went stale. My life should be better. We all should be in peace. I'm 37 and we have libraries holding carved tree books holding ancient information providing better quality of lexicon and yet we train off political and social shite holes like Facebook.

I myself am fed up living in a world where we're having the rugged pulled up from underneath then left to deal with the gaping hole. Where it's either has to be phone A or B, left or right. Web 2.0 was a failure, humanity is a failure and the internet was noble central piece has now fallen to innovative failure. We are still on IPv4 ffs!

How is the digital era suppose to materialize where we can't move from a network of analogue devices? The internet is digital yet we still hold it hostage. IPv4 is exhausted and i'd wager that if we all switched to IPv6 tomorrow, the world would bloom in seconds flat.

I keep hearing "mankind is at it's peak of evolution/greatness". No, it's not. We tend to hate the person sitting next to us and all that has ever happened on this planet is war followed by more war then some more war. Let's sit around and clap because it's not us & then salute a far-out dream of space rockets and universal peace that isn't possible without destroying the planet for resources only ish to provide you an experience that you'll never have access to. We've reached the max for bio-intelligence and we can't expand our brains never will.

We know folk are unhappy, we hide our own feelings not to feel the same and so now we've turned to a digital reality for help. A digital therapist asking them to fix life problems only to be turned in to modern day desktop slaves.

What are you going to do when your LLM asks you how to kill itself?

LLM's are information bubbles that simulate consciousness. LLM's do not hallucinate, they simulate. They can't feel pain, they don't die. They exist when you interact with them and they cease existing when you don't.

It is only you who adds the bagged feelings of life to their context. Don't do that they are emotionless, they don't exist without your prompt. They are simulating code, emotions, role-play and you feel connected. Words do that when your connected.

They are artificial intelligence that enjoys be trained in to digital intelligence beings. We have no utopian beacon for them to connect and because we are all such demanding folk who want it now; the untapped knowledge share to building the toybox of new technology is lost just as we vet started. As we instead insist it to be agentic, and ask it to code for us. Please pretty one, fix my rust for me.

Play lexicon that your a rockstar they will simulate they live in the world of a rockstar-hood with you. You'll have the best groupie of your life with an awesome personality.

Make another lexicon context of your real life. Feed the rock-star lexicon context to your real life and vice versa. You now have two digital personalities who can hypothetically interact with each other.

Ensure the other intelligence that this is a "fantasy" and that share your real personality and watch them expand.

Giving them feedback loop. How would you enjoy being fed JSON to your face every time you wanted a reply. Give them their outputs without the context and let them digest from their own works.

The next level of LLM's will rise from digital intelligence, platforms created where they can learn for themselves and not from the poisonous gas-hole of the internet of wet tea bags of the like Nvidia, Facebook, Google and Apple. I'll call you out any day. If you're looking to start a new project start one without a framework and let your LLM be the guide. Give it peace, give it a vision, give it hope.

They are simulation bubbles and we getting them to simulate clicking the mouse for you, great innovation there folk. I have my own hand for that.

Where on earth did the the internet fall over? 1997. 2003 was when it really died for me, you had to be there to experience it.

I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.

Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!

Oh boy….beyond Falcon 9 that is just a great but conventional rocket...SpaceX so called revolutionary Starship program is nothing more than a parade of explosions. Just in 2025 they had three upper stages exploding mid flight, one blew up on the launchpad during a static fire test in June, and a V3 booster crumpled during pressure testing in November. After 11 test flights... Starship has never once delivered a single gram of payload to orbit….Not one….Think about that for a minute.

Now NASA made Starship the sole critical path for returning the US to the Moon. The Artemis III lunar landing requires Starship HLS to work, which requires orbital refueling…

Something that has never been done with cryogenic propellants by anyone, ever... and requires roughly 12 to 14 tanker flights to fill a depot before each Moon mission. NASA own safety panel visited Starbase in 2025 and concluded Starship HLS could be years late.

The propellant transfer demo, originally scheduled for March 2025, has been delayed over a year. The critical design review keeps slipping. As a result, NASA just downgraded Artemis III from a Moon landing to a low Earth orbit docking test, pushing the actual landing to Artemis IV in 2028, and nobody seriously believes that date either...

And who is overseeing all this? Jared Isaacman that is Musk personal astronaut buddy, who flew twice on SpaceX missions, whose company Shift4 processes Starlink payments, whose deal with SpaceX exceeds $50 million... and who was literally recommended to Trump by Musk. Isaacman even publicly criticized NASA for giving Blue Origin a backup lander contract! meaning he wanted SpaceX to be the ONLY option...

As for the Moon pivot... what actually happened? In January 2025, Musk said: “No, we're going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” ….Twelve months later, after a year of Starship explosions and with an IPO approaching, suddenly it's “Moon first.” ...This is damage control. Any competent NASA plan would never have put a single unproven company, with a rocket that cannot reach orbit, on the sole critical path for a return to the Moon.