The Race to Colonize Mars Perpetuates a Dangerous Religion
nautil.us
nautil.us
Mars is an unbelievably hostile environment. People can’t live on Mars. And why would you even want to? Compared to earth it’s a dusty hell.
Do some research on how livable Mars is. It really isn’t.
Humans will never travel to the stars - that’s a hundred billion times less likely than traveling to Mars. Actually not even that…. interstellar travel is impossible.
I loved the science fiction of traveling to the stars until I understood that the nearest star is so far it would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there using technology even vaguely within our grasp - and really there’s no such technology.
If mega wealthy man boys like Musk want to waste money in boys own adventure science fiction instead of making real change here in earth well that’s their decision.
The man knows how to sell, sadly.
I don't get it either
Maybe it's all just bullshit to cover for some high grade military space program, like space is the next frontier, and the US wants to rule there too.
If the really big problems here on Earth could be fixed by throwing a few tens of billions at them, they'd have been fixed already by governments.
Musk does fart jokes.
And that makes a lot of people incredibly angry/scared.
He's monetizing speech, not making it free.
He has displayed all the "media bias" he accused others of having --- just in an opposite and arguably more extreme manner.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/elon-musk-blocks-likes-a...
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-j...
more examples here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...
Thanks for the good chuckle though.
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/2022-tesla-impact-report-hig...
Tesla's impact on CO2, NOx and PM25 emissions have prevented a large number of premature deaths (at least 6 figures, likely).
Musk didn't start Tesla to save the world, he's not an environmentalist, he's a humanist. He started Tesla because he thought the world was running out of oil. But a lot of Tesla employees are environmentalists, and so are a lot of their customers.
Intentional or not, Elon Musk & Tesla will be responsible for a significant decrease in the global warming rise.
I don't know if he'll beat Gates or not in terms of global positive impact, but they can be compared.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/judge-strikes-claim-who-can-be-de...
If you have a point that is actually relevant to the original comment please make it. You're arguing semantics, not substance. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that Musk "started Tesla" because it's a contested point but removing that phrase has 0 impact on the rest of the comment.
You’ll never have the environment we have here (even in its currently declining state).
Do you think society will be better on Mars living in indentured servitude for generations?
As Lennon said, “war is over, if you want it”. It’s the same with the problems we have down here.
It's a step on the way to going even further, beyond our solar system.
How do you propose to travel for over 20 years?
It's clear then that robots will be exploring the solar system, not us. Even then it's going to take several centuries just to travel to, collect data from, and send back to earth just from the local stars we can see with the unaided eye.
When they say space is big, space is BIG.
Or if we can't do that (which would be weird since many complex mammals can hibernate already) then generation ships are possible. It'll probably be only done by culturally crazy groups, but hey! They're still counted as humans, and their expanding human habitats into new systems is still a win to us all.
We're not going within my lifetime, but we don't know what currently-unimaginable technologies could be developed in the future (if we don't destroy our civilization within the next few decades)
Significantly extending the lifespan of humans seems inevitable at some point. Robotics and AI will continue to improve. We may master fusion, or discover new ways to store energy. We'll probably mine asteroids and master construction in space.
Robots will lead the way, but humans are unlikely to lose the urge to explore.
The most important point to realize about science fiction is that it is fiction.
We should tell it to physicists ;-)
That was the same in 1700s. Laws of mechanics were well known and they were convinced that it was just about getting better in using math with it.
Then electricity and magnetism emerged.
Then nuclear physics and quantum theories and relativity.
And we know very well that they don't match up.
And we have anomalies all over in our measurements and no good theory to explain them.
But just using "known" physics theories we have warp drives and warmholes and quantum teleportation.
Going to the moon was something impossible and we accomplished it.
Before the same was for flying or going deep underwater.
Do you need more examples to get some fate?
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dbalmer/eportfolio/Nature%20of%20...
Our knowledge is incomplete, but we can put boundary boxes around what is possible. Just because our theories are incomplete doesn't mean that what we know is wrong. Our knowledge has been extensively tested over the past 100 years.
Based on our incomplete knowledge. So we really can't. What would a proof that something is physically impossible look like?
Newton was wrong, Einstein has provided us a better, more accurate, theory of gravity. Guess what? We still teach Newton in high school and college physics! Why? Because though it's wrong it's only wrong in the most extreme circumstances. Generally speaking it works quite well. The only observation we made contradicting Newton was Mercury's perihelion precession. But Einstein didn't change how fast apples fall to the ground.
Likewise, we know, or at least strongly suspect, Einstein is wrong. That doesn't mean everything we've observed the past 100 years corroborating General Relativity goes out the window with a new theory. No, instead that's what makes creating a new theory hard: you have to account for a century's worth of observations validating GR and reconcile with QFT (otherwise why bother).
But it wouldn't change anything about what we already know and what we've observed. That's why it's a boundary box. This is science, not magic.
Notably, the idea that a new theory simply takes existing "observations" and adds to them is historically unfounded. Indeed, many theories start as thought experiments that contradict observation and later turn out to be better models, not the other way around.
You also may or may not be familiar with the concepts of theory-ladenness and the commensurability of theories. If not, I suggest doing some reading about that so you can appreciate why those questions aren't as straightforward as you seem to believe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commensurability_(philosophy_o...
This is important in this discussion because we've never observed anything traveling faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That would appear to rule-out faster-than-light travel, which for practical reasons would make traveling to other solar systems impossible.
Sorry, that simply isn't true. Multi-generation starships don't violate any laws of physics.
> How do you propose to travel for over 20 years?
By recognizing that you aren't coming back, and that even if you don't make it there, your children will.
I mean, we have examples of this even here on Earth. Moses and the Israelites supposedly wandered for 40 years. The pioneers who set out on the Oregon Trail largely knew it was a one-way trip. Other examples abound..
That's true - but they do violate what we know about psychology. You're signing on your progeny to be imprisoned on a ship from birth to death, when you yourself never had to endure that. Think about the sentiment behind the "Okay, Boomer..." memes and magnify that generational hatred several-fold. Someone is going to sabotage the ship and its crew long before they ever reach their destination. That's just how people work. Remember, we're not rational.
Plenty of people have lived out their lives while rarely or never leaving their small town.
In fact, that was the default for most of human history.
How is that going to work for your population confined to a ship the size of a small town? It isn't. It's science fiction.
Future generations may grow up in a world of much more limited travel, existing in small areas of '15-minute cities' without cars, minimal access to air travel, living in tiny apartments, and most likely spending most of their time in some sort of metaverse, with very limited food choices. We'll have stopped burning fossil fuels and given most of the planet back to nature, and can't allow the working-class masses the transport/freedoms to access/enjoy/ruin it again.
If that's what the world comes to, it'll be a lot closer to life on a generation ship than the world we're used to today.
Not that any of this solves the problem of humanity having nowhere to go. The trip is ultimately futile since the stars you're going to are also dying.
Some did. Most stayed in their little town for their entire lives.
> How is that going to work for your population confined to a ship the size of a small town?
The same way it worked for small towns before mass transportation was available.
- Food production with low resources consumption.
- Distributed, low-scale production with high efficiency. So no need for high consumes to keep high production efficiency.
- Implementing renewable energy and the concepts listed above from the ground up in every aspect of life. That's scarcity, harsh environments and need for you together with bright minds.
- And many many things that we can't even imagine from here.
> “war is over, if you want it”
The problem is the "if you want it". That's for most of the unsolved problem we have on earth.
If you keep failing generation after generation maybe you need to change your point of view to understand how small we are and as we are not much different each other and from other living things.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Governments don't exist to "fix problems". Governments exist to perpetuate problems so that tax money can be funneled to cronies under the guise of "fixing" problems.
And if we indeed manage, we will jumper further and farther. Only 100 years ago, there were no planes. No planes are like ants. Unimaginable.
Indeed have to take care of our home. And we can do much better.
But it feels silly when people shame people for wild and excitement dreams. Are we not allowed to have fun? Everyone not working on cancer research should be shamed?
It might even serve some purpose one day, but for now it's just exciting and thats important in its own right.
Your 100% right that living on Mars right now is going to suck. A lot. As the "man boy" said before, there is a good chance that the first people on Mars will just die.
If they don't die they will have a very hard life. If they manage to survive and get back they will probably have lasting health effects.
And the next several expeditions to Mars will likely be the same.
The _hope_ is that after X number of expeditions we will start to build something that resembles hospitability. Eventually that might even lead to growth.
Will we success? Who knows. But if we take your "man boy" approach then we'll for sure be stuck here forever until we get hit by an asteroid or something else.
Mars is like 7-9 months away on the best pork chop plot. And even if you have something like an Aldrin cycler that may be able to cut that down at certain point to a few months, theres still a lot that can go wrong in that time. The average time to communicate to mars is something like 15 minutes as well. Its a totally different ballgame of "they are on their own". Even if you compare that to say....Christopher Columbus or others (that did similar for the time, but also knew there was a good chance they had the resources needed to survive)
Mars has some water and basic elements (O2, N2, H2O) but not much else otherwise. ANy food, probably drinks, shielding, and technology to make long term viability possible will have to be towed along.
Mars does seem like an option for expansion at some point. I am just not sure it will be in any of our lifetimes though.
Did what? We put a few people on the Moon during the Cold War, then we ignored it for 50 years.
Now there's another war with Russia, and we're talking about putting people on the Moon again. It's all about nationalistic nonsense.
Not to mention that the Moon is a heck of a lot closer to the Earth than Mars.
To me this whole "let's rush to Mars" without even having a moon base is just insane.
It is closer to earth though.
We could potentially build this sort of earth-moon infrastructure out over the next few decades.
It's their goal to force the peasants to live there so they can keep the earth to themselves.
Like how masses were exported by the (mostly false) promise of potential riches, or by force, to America and Australia from Europe.
Starship will enable us to bring much more mass into orbit. Communication satellites mostly. The JWST would have been easier and cheaper to construct with the payload diameter of Starship. You could even launch much larger telescopes. Commercial space stations aren't really viable yet, and there's not that much to do for Humans in LEO. That's going to change. On top of all that, there are ideas to use Starship as a point-to-point transportation system for destinations on Earth.
The problem is that the space boys aren't bankrolling this Mars delusion personally. They're counting on incredibly lucratice US federal and later international governmental contracts. Basically, whether we make it to Mars or not, there's going to be a lot of money going to Musk et al during the process and I don't think that's by accident.
So is Southern California. Some of the early missions founded by the Spaniards starved to death. Modern life there is absolutely dependent on technology. Take away the electricity, gasoline, and water and millions would die in short order.
> interstellar travel is impossible.
Not with multi-generation starships, it isn't.
12. GOVERNING LAW.
… For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
Example: AI is a threat to humanity --- as soon as it learns how to differentiate fact from fiction on the internet.
But equating technologist with "science" or "scientist" is a fallacy. Technologists may employ science as a tool but they have no obligation to justify or offer proof of their work.
Example: Musk may *believe* that a colony of some sort can be built on Mars --- but there is no proof that it will ever be self sustaining over time or that significant numbers of sane people would ever willingly choose to try and live there.
So sorry --- science and religion are not the same.
In the shorter term, humans can either *choose* to live in a more sustainable manner in this solar system or the choice can be forced upon them.
Personal judgment --- resources would be much better spent on sustainability rather than escape at this point in time.
The shelf life of complex life on Earth is probably closer the end than to the beginning. Still a lot of time left from our perspective, but we have to save ourselves -- and the legacy of complex life on Earth -- sometime.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future Expand "Lists" and search for "photosynthesis".
Things will improve here on Earth once we realize we're stuck in this solar system. Forever.
I don't think this bleak defeatism is warranted at all. It feels like a projection of hopelessness about local affairs.
Surface-wise, planets are actually non-ideal. Habitats are where it's at, baby. (E.g., O'Neill cylinders or, more fancifully, ringworlds.) But we probably can't ever build those cuz we suck! T_T Waaaah!!
> Who does Elon think he is?
Is this suppose to be a hit piece? I'm sure there was someone whining about Christopher Columbus as well, but discovering the americas was a pivotal moment in human history.
Some people take Elon Musk too seriously. His timelines are always overambitious. Starship will not be going to Mars (even unmanned) any time soon. Even though Musk says it's necessary for interplanetary travel, at least the first dozen or "Starships" or so will have much less ambitious tasks: Launching Starlink satellites, maybe other commercial payloads and of course going to the moon. All of those missions require multiple prototypes. I'd be surprised if any Starship makes its way to Mars in the next five years. More like ten years, even for the first unmanned mission.
That's the point of the article. The idea of colonizing Mars has become a kind of religion.
Ambitions are a good thing. I do believe it is a good idea to have a permanent settlement on Mars, mostly for scientific reasons. But there's no "race" toward this goal, not even a forceful push. Progress is slow but steady now.
There may be? This seems almost deliberately obtuse.
The only reason the author takes Musk seriously is that Musk has hordes of followers and worshippers. You can see it here on HN. You can see it on Twitter.
This aspect of the interview, to me, was far more interesting than anything to do with Elon Musk. I also was not aware that Nietzsche had called scientists "priests of the modern world." So it seems that even in the realm of space exploration--and I can hardly think of an area that seems to have been more insulated from religion--humans just don't seem to be able to help themselves but to keep reintroducing the religious and the supernatural (whether it be the Apollo 8 astronauts reading from Genesis or current NASA advisors checking to make sure they account for beings on other planets that might communicate through "shamanic states").
A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered.Not to put too fine a point on it, I suppose?
wow.