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Comment by gweinberg | Hacker News Reader

Okay, but you not only have the question of why they did it when they did it, but also why they didn't in the previous 1700 years. We haven't been to Mars yet because the technology isn't ready, not because nobody has the hankering.

Maybe there is no real reason, at some point the cool kids started doing it and the wanna-be's imitated the cool kids. Or maybe not.

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Mars is more of a cost thing than a technology problem. We could definitely make it work if we dared.

Tom Murphy a "recovering astrophysicist" from UCSD, would beg to differ. His basic thesis is that, in order to build human settlements in other worlds, we would have to construct, from scratch, a large part of the ecosystem on which our life on Earth depends. That ecosystem is huge, interconnected, and largely unknown to us. We can't build it ourselves.

You can't just strap on oxygen tanks and take protein pills and expect to live very long, away from this planet.

I agree with him that the moon landings and the current batch of people living on the ISS are part of extremely expensive and unsustainable stunts. They're not steps towards living off-world.

See https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/10/2025-a-space-absurdity/

You've been watching too many movies, and reading too few physics books.

The first generation is pretty much guaranteed to die young of cancer. Yay them!

There's ZERO way to limit radiation exposure on the trip. I'm not even sure the to-date astronauts have been outside it (the Moon is protected 25% of the time).

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