Why Going to Mars Would Be Bad for Your Health | Hacker News Reader

Why Going to Mars Would Be Bad for Your Health

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24 pointsRickJWagner34 comments

Colonizing Mars never made any sense. Mars has the worst of both worlds when it comes to atmosphere: too little to ever be useful, but enough to be really super annoying (eg by covering your equipment with razor-sharp dust because obviously there's been no water recently to erode those sharp edges). Gravity is still pretty low. There's no radiation protection. So yeah, you were going to be living underground. But you can do that on the Moon without all the atmosphere annoyances and the Moon alreaedy has documented lava tubes so you don't need to excavate.

Remember when Elon said the Moon was a "distraction" and they were going "straight to Mars" [1]? That was only a year ago. At the time my guess was that a) Starship is just badly designed for being a lunar landing vehicle and b) the project is way behind anyway so this was just a way of kicking the can down the street. So what changed?

It's NASA's overhaul of the Artemis and SLS programs (IMHO) [2]. NASA wants to improve these programs by launching them more often and that, in Elon's mind, turns them into more of a competitor and takes money away from SpaceX. It's as simple as that.

I stand by my criticism of Starship: I think history will show it to be the Cybertruck of SpaceX. It's a poorly designed platform and it's beiggest problem is going to be that it has to compete with Falcon 9. It's going to be fantastically expensive to develop. It's still many years away from its promise (eg in-orbit refuelling) and there simply isn't the demand to get payloads that large into LEO or geostationary orbit.

[1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875023335891026324?lang=en

[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-artemis-moon-program-overh...

Never is a long time.

When Fermi asked "Where is everyone?" one of the likeliest answers is they stayed home, maybe after they tried not to stay home.

Perhaps a tad overly-curmudgeonly but still a good argument against Mars is "A City on Mars"[1] by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (the SMBC[2] guy)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars

[2]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/

The first astronauts that get sent to Mars will teach everyone that that was under-curmudgeonly.

Musk is actually a brilliant marketer. He built his companies around a "vision", used it to attract high quality talent and push that talent to give their best.

For Tesla it was "electrify transport to end dependence on fossil fuels and save the planet", for SpaceX it was "save humanity by becoming a multi-planetary species".

With how much he talked about it, he did probably actually believe in Mars.

But now both of these ideals have come into conflict with his newfound political affiliations, so they have to be dropped.

> But now both of these ideals have come into conflict with his newfound political affiliations, so they have to be dropped.

How so? Do you mean Trump's refusal to accept Climate change?

I don't know. I think the simpler answer is that Elon knows damn well that we're not colonizing Mars any time soon, but he also knows he could probably bag a few trillion if he can trick humanity into kicking off the biggest space boondoggle the world has ever seen.

> he could probably bag a few trillion if he can trick humanity into kicking off the biggest space boondoggle

That makes no sense. You don't pick colonizing Mars as a get rich quick scheme. Also his seemingly genuine obsession has revolutionized space launch with Falcon 9's and internet connections with Starlink.

Not sure how either of those are space boondoggles. Even Starship is making huge progress towards something which could help make a moonbase a reality in the next few years.

> Elon Musk has recently stated that SpaceX will, at least right now, no longer be focusing on traveling to Mars

Wait you mean Elon has been full of shit all this time???

No Mars, no autonomous cars, no robots…

But delivered on rockets and StarLink.

I’d say it’s mixed!

What would you call a person who, when presented with new information, refuses to change their mind? Dogmatic? Religious? An Idiot? I'm sure there's some self-serving reason the guy wants to go to the moon. What we don't know is if he's had that in mind the entire time.

About as dangerous as climbing Everest. So we definitely shouldn't do that either, in case these pearl clutching anti-progress journalists experience emotional discomfort.

Drip with contempt, much?

"Space travel is bad for your health and here's what we know about it" is actually a fine article. It's his concluding statement that is contemptible.

"Space may be fascinating, wonderful, and exciting, but most of all, it is incredibly dangerous. As far as human space travel goes, it’s probably best that it stays in the realm of science fiction, at least for the foreseeable future."

How about letting explorers, informed adults, and risk takers make their own decisions.

It's okay to realise some things are just beyond us right now. There is plenty of other things humans can do with their time.

I would rather the geniuses of earth work on anti-aging or cancer research than wish fulfillment of a 50 year old man child.

I'd like it if they could just figure out how to make everything cost less.

Fixed pie fallacy.

Amazing how little enthusiasm for the future there is on HN these days. If things seem hard or impossible to do, there's no reason to stop trying.

Alternatively people here may have realized the techno fascism and adolescent sci-fi fantasies played an unfortunate role in bringing the nation to where it is today.

It's typical fear mongering "this isn't possible because of reasons X, Y, Z". We haven't even tried it yet, or much space travel at all. It's way to soon to jump to conclusions.

It's not fear mongering when they lay out a good argument, which is not what you're doing.

It's fascinating that you and nick49488171 both characterize this article in ways that no reasonable person would ("pearl clutching", "fear mongering") and have nothing substantive to say about the points made at all.

I was not arguing about the hazards of space travel. Of course it is hazardous. I dislike the article because his conclusion is more dangerous to society than any hazardous activity: "something is dangerous therefore nobody should do it." And he makes no arguments to support this conclusion.

TFA concluded no such thing from my reading:

“As far as human space travel goes, it’s probably best that it stays in the realm of science fiction, at least for the foreseeable future.”

And no arguments for that conclusion? C’mon: radiation, the effects of microgravity on human bodies, none of which we have good solutions for…yet. The author argues that we don’t have good solutions, and probably won’t within their lifetime. If you’ve got counter-arguments, let’s hear them, but calling the TFA’s sound arguments “pearl clutching” isn’t productive.

The counter argument is this: if the chance of dying is 2% to make a historic mission, then people should be able to make that choice. What's your counterargument to this statement?

As for your hazards Microgravity can be counteracted with a centrifugal living environment.

Radiation can not be mitigated effectively yet other than throwing mass at the problem. But if someone wants to launch enough mass that's on them.

What's your counterargument to this statement?

Don’t need one, it’s an opinion piece, with plenty of facts to back it up. You’ve proposed solutions that don’t yet exist. When those solutions are viable, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. But at the moment it would appear that such a journey has low odds of ending well. If Musk wants to burn cash, and has willing participants, go for it. But with my tax dollars? Yeah, you’re going to have to do better than a lick, prayer, and a hearty “good luck!”

You could literally have made exactly the same argument about the moon landing in 1969! And people actually did, some were truly against it. Way too expensive, near impossible, lethal, pointless, all the arguments were used.

all true, too expensive and near impossible and pointless and…

I would make the same argument about bicycles then. What is the point of spending taxpayer money providing services for such a dangerous activity?

I get that he's making points, but it's not clear at all that it's not worth trying. His argument is basically that we don't try.

I think the bigger issue is I doubt any company is going to blow a trillion dollars to send a person to Mars.

TFA made some good arguments to support their case, including observations from the space travel we have “tried”. I’m interested to hear your counter-arguments that are more detailed than “nuh, uh!”

I’m willing to bet gestating an embryo on Mars will f*k that kid up in a myriad ways. It would be child abuse.

It amuses me that Elon enthusiasts are 99.9% people behaving like teen boys who've never had a conversation with a woman. If women were more widely represented among investors and company leaders, I doubt we would be hearing about baloney like colonizing a planet covered in poisonous dust with no exploitable resources. That kind of thinking doesn't even have a basis in understanding the colonization of our own planet.

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