The Mars Dream Is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen
thenewatlantis.com
thenewatlantis.com
But it would be a nightmare for anyone but musk himself, who wants to go be a space slave for no benefits? There could never be freedom or individualistic incentives, its <1% chance to be like Firefly and >99% chance to be The Expanse
Kind of interesting to listen to, though I wish now that instead he’d turned his attention to AI. There’s huge potential for revolution when our whole economy is upended and humanity is facing an existential terminus.
But I DO think that BEFORE we try to send people to Mars we should invest a lot more in local orbital architecture like space habitats. Building bigger space stations would be cheaper, easier, safer, and more immediately beneficial. They could be a stepping stone to the moon or Mars but would be beneficial in their own right
Maybe down the line AI robots could build a base for humans and then we could go out and take holiday snaps and stuff.
At this point I’m hopeful a space race happens driving competition to get to Mars. People can channel all the patriotic/nationalistic zeal productively toward the science and engineering involved in bringing humanity back to the Moon and to Mars and maybe even beyond.
Also you shouldn't equate testing flights of Starship with regular flights of a system which completed development. You mostly see spectacular Starship explosions because they are harder to hide and are turned into a show - like fireworks, only different :) .
Falcon-9 demonstrates a very high lelel of reliability, we have all reasons to assume the Starship will reach a similar level.
Although worthwhile, there is no imperative to go to Mars. The idea we should colonize Mars to escape our problems on Earth will just result in two planets with the same sorts of problems.
As proof: life on Earth did survive the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. We're here, we live. Meanwhile, Mars remains a desolate, lifeless hellscape.
Whatever indoor/underground habitats would be required for humans to survive on Mars could be built vastly, vastly, vastly, vastly more easily on Earth.
Using Mars as a backup for life is like storing your computer backups in an active volcano, basically the stupidest idea ever. Mars is actively hostile to human life in so many ways. The so-called backup is worse than no backup.
You've been sold a bill of goods. Mars was always a sideshow, a clever way of recruiting naive tech and science nerds to the cause of glorifying one sociopathic man. The head DOGE is in the process of cutting and shutting down scientific research all across the US, as well as eliminating all regulation of the environment and pollution. He's aligned himself with regressive religious nuts who want to bring back the Dark Ages. Those aren't the actions of someone dedicated to saving the Earth, much less going to Mars. But hey, perhaps science was "too woke". No, problem, we can just replace it with Christian Science, amirite.
It's way too easy to pretend that massive problems can magically be solved by some imagined but nonexistent tech.
In any case, we're not even close to having this tech during the lifetime of Elon Musk, who's now over 50 and has been promising a Mars colony for decades. I don't know what's possible in the far future, but in the near future this is all just hand-waving nonsense. They can't even get Full Self-Driving cars right that don't crash randomly.
Ok, bud, whatever you need to tell yourself. I'm done here.
Again, just wild assumptions on your part.