Mars is a total boondoggle - a colony would require constant supply runs from Earth to support a double-digit population - who is going to field the cost and what are they going to do there ?.
"The Martian" was work of fiction.
A lunar colony is cheaper and way more feasible.
Funnelling a lot of government money into the pockets of the best candidate for the world's first trillionare.
If the point is a colony, then we should just do it on the moon. If the point is for the advances in technology it will bring, we don’t have to go to Mars to explore those things. We could just keep practicing on the moon.
Obviously it’s not exactly the same but idk, most of why I’d be interested in our going to mars can be answered with “it’s easier, more feasible, and generally just as useful to do it on the moon instead.” It’s still low gravity, no oxygen/breathable atmosphere, a hostile desert essentially, etc. but far closer. We can respond to emergencies more easily. We know for a fact we are currently capable of getting there and back safely.
TL;DR: we will likely get a lot more out of dumping our resources into trips to and from the moon and building something there than trying to go to mars for a very long time.
Mars sucks. The moon sucks too. We need rotating space habitats. With gravity and hookers.
Mars is infinitely more viable than anywhere in Venus for the simple fact that you are on solid ground with resources all around you.
Without orbital infrastructure shipping supplies in neither are viable.
Use your non-sockpuppet, please.
People like you make no sense to me. I am a minority, and don't turn my head from this reality.
You're suggesting that the drop reveals a quota, but it really only shows a slight drop from the norm for black students from the period pre-Pandemic (from ~8% to 5%) and a slightly larger drop for Hispanic/Latino students (from ~17% to 11%). Most of the change across the larger timescale has been fewer white students and more Asian students.
Your "abuse" was a handful of years of slightly increased consideration of qualified black applicants post-George Floyd protests, after decades of racial considerations boosting black enrollment by maybe 2% or 3% compared to the most current incoming class's proportion. This boost is slightly higher for Hispanic/Latino applicants, but still not much to consider (insofar as it's roughly equal to the boost in proportion of Asian students).
We'll not talk about the fact that affirmative action is still alive and well in the admissions process, as gender is still a valid consideration.
This is specifically at MIT, which chooses its class from a pool of qualified applicants (which means that, even with the demographic changes, everyone who was there was someone who deserved to be there), without recognition of sports, legacy, and international student interests. This is decidedly not the case elsewhere, where racial consideration had little effect on class composition when compared to the aforementioned.
In short: your grievance is not serious. It's shallow and formed from misconceptions. If you cared about abuse in college admissions, you would accept that legacy and moneyed interests are more of a drag than racial consideration as a remedy to decades of discrimination. The protections were not only valid, but not even given serious consideration until after our most recent reckoning with America's structural racism, and just as quickly torn up at the first opportunity.
https://ir.mit.edu/projects/demographic-dashboard/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240829012444/https://mitadmiss...