3 ms·

That's a completely ridiculous statement and I don't see how you can back it up.

• andrewstuart 11y ago
  Radiation for one, but apart from that, in 2015 we don't even go beyond low earth orbit and we'll just have to wait and see but I'm guessing that no one will ever go to Mars. No actual people have gone to Mars because its prohibitively expensive but also so incredibly unbelievably hard technically it will never happen. Also undesirable. Why the heck would we want to colonise Mars? It's a desert where we can't live without life support. It's just sci fi to imagine we can or that it would be of value or sustainable. Earth is our home and will be forever.
  • fsloth 11y ago
    As per the difficulty and cost of space travel - it took in the order of hundreds of years of development for several impactful technologies to be tinkered and optimized to a point where they started to make a difference. Steam engines, mechanical watches, etc. E.g. the first watches that could keep time to assist in measurement of the longitude were incredibly expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison. I know historical arguments are usually kinda weak but objectively - space flight is still a young discipline. I hope you respect that in historical perspective "we've never done it and so won't ever do it" is really weak. It will require empirical testing to figure out if spacefaring human civilization is a tenable concept. Large system cannot be reasoned with beforehand (well, if there are deep physical principles that are obvious then, yeah, sure, but at this point the problem space appears like more like a complex expensive mess of many uknowns rather than a physical impossibility).