Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

Interest in Mars colonization benefits from the fact that photographs capture the best of Mars and hide the problems.

The best of Mars is that the terrain is something we are well-adapted to and familiar with, effectively a desert. We can stand, walk around, drive around, build things, etc., just like on Earth.

You can see that in the photo: it looks like a desert on Earth; I think many people unconsciously assume it's like New Mexico. In a way the photos are like old scams enticing pioneers to settle in wondrous unseen places.

Photos suit Mars perfectly because they omit all the worst information: Temperature, pressure, magnetic field, gravity, and to a degree, isolation and almost complete lack of water. You can't see those in the photo.

Articles like this always bring out the best comments. Obviously it’s a biased article but the two primary points, in my opinion, stand.

1. Even the most inhospitable places on Earth are orders of magnitude more hospitable than Mars. 2. Given 1 it seems much more reasonable to use resources to maximize the hospitality of Earth than to try and mark Mars hospitable.

Colonising mars will be a lot like colonising the moon or asteroids, but the gravity will be more human-friendly.

Humans must either become a spacefaring civilisation or go extinct along with all life on earth , full stop. Not working on that problem means dying more or less right away from a geological time perspective. (Relatively) soon earth will be outside of a habitable dust from the sun. Maybe we can move it. But im pretty sure that moving the planet would be harder than colonising mars.

I don’t think anyone thinks that colonising mars means living or even going outside of a pressurised artificial habitat . It would be very much like living in a spacecraft…. But it would be relatively easy to make it really, really big.

I have lived in places where people live in one big building for 6 months at a time, with some of them having not left the building for years. It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me that people could adapt to an essentially indoor environment.

I don’t get it. He uses Everest and the South Pole as proof that Mars can’t support human life.

But there’s a base at the South Pole and people climb Everest

I think these are substantial engineering issues, but I think he must be kidding. They are obviously solvable.

I read, for example, that you can put a nuclear powered electromagnet in one of the Lagrange points that will protect Mars from solar wind.

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41518196

> This ordering of priorities, in which the sacrosanct goal is to extend "the probable lifespan of consciousness" and space colonization the means, is above all else a monstrous permission structure for this outspoken bigot's vile social ideas, a kind of reductio ad absurdum for what's been doing business as "effective altruism" for a while now.

The author is frankly, biased to the point of being deranged. Even if this rant were written in a more mature way, I would say that he lacks imagination and ambition. A lot of things that exist today - both good and bad - would have been only fiction fifty years ago. To me this sort of criticism feels like someone standing on the sidelines thinking they somehow know it all.

> and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay

citation needed

“Humanity is dooooomedddd”

The hubris of predicting the future out to infinity?

Mars rovers seem to function ok there.

"Man will never fly"

Second verse, same as the first.