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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

The moon doesn't have enough mass to hold onto an atmosphere.

Still, I think we should build a moon base for the same reason we should go to Mars: even if these projects don't yield direct benefits, they are probably necessary steps to exploring the solar system and beyond.

In terms of your "why explore space at all while children are dying in Africa?" argument -- we can do multiple things at once! Anyway, people's interests aren't fungible: you can't force the people who want to dedicate their lives to exploring space to instead dedicate their lives to curing malaria. Even if you could, people should be allowed to do what they like. And complaining that person X is doing prosocial activity A rather than prosocial activity B is stupid and antisocial.

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I agree that we should be putting bases on the Moon, but not at the cost of doing the same on Mars (do both). Doing it on Mars has value in being a forcing function for attaining efficiency and self-sustainability that the Moon can’t due to its ease of accessibility, which can then be used to help grow our Moon presence to something larger than antarctic-style science outposts into something more permanent that can’t have the rug pulled out from under it by myopic politicians.

Can Mars hold onto atmosphere? I was under the impression that the general consensus was Mars lost its atmosphere when it lost its magnetic field.

According to google that process took several hundred million years. As long as we generate atmosphere faster than it gets stripped away, there's no problem.

Anyway, I think terraforming is getting ahead of ourselves. Step one is getting supplies to Mars. Step two is building a base there. Step three is making that base as self-sufficient as possible. Down the road from that we can worry about generating an atmosphere.

Me too

I didn’t mention anything about kids or Africa. And I certainly don’t think we should disallow people from doing what they wish and I wasn’t complaining.

I was merely asking what the point was, from the comparative costs and difficulty of terraforming other planets vs Earth.

> people's interests aren't fungible

But financial capital, political capital, and public attention are fungible and directly trade off. Want a space program at the top of a national political party platform? What are priorities are you going to give up fighting for to prioritize that?

> But financial capital, political capital, and public attention are fungible and directly trade off.

I'm not sure that's true in any simple way.

As far as the government goes, it has a role, but this isn't the 60s. SpaceX has shown that a company can launch rockets. As long as there are people willing to work on the necessary problems and people willing to take the necessary risks, I see no reason (that isn't degenerate) why anyone would want to obstruct those efforts. It's not like making SpaceX illegal is going to somehow fix climate change or cure malaria.

None of those things are fungible.

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