5 ms·
My question would be...why exactly would you want to help do this? Um, have you not seen what we've done to earth? Why would you want to help spread our human-n
by rayvy 8y ago
My question would be...why exactly would you want to help do this? Um, have you not seen what we've done to earth? Why would you want to help spread our human-ness to Mars?
I'm always so confused by people who want us to go to Mars (cough Elon Musk), like that's suddenly going to make humans not do human ish. Like Mars is going to make us suddenly not racist. Like Mars is suddenly going to make us start giving a damn about our environment and fellow man. It's kind've laughable honestly.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoThis is a well-discussed topic (roughly twice a month on HN, to my experience) so I don't think there's a point in going again over all the reasons for Mars colonization. But making humans better at humaning isn't the reason anyone is advocating. Like you observed, it would be dumb. The reasons range from dreams of exploration, through science, raising morale, creating a backup to mitigate impact of planetary-scale disasters, technology spinoff, to pushing humanity out into the void - where we should have been present for decades now.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI don't think there is a hope in hell that we can achieve it. Just look at how much effort it took to get to the moon, colonising Mars is an infinitely more difficult problem.
- break_the_bank 8y agoThey were on the moon in 9 years and we have had fifty years since. Peter Thiel, would call the lunar mission a part of our "Deterministic Optimisim". If you assume humans keep progressing,after a certain point we should be able to colonize different plants. Its not about if its about when.
- break_the_bank 8y agoHuman beings are explorers. It'd be sad for us to not explore whats out there. To explore whats out there, given our limited life spans it makes sense to have bases in space and mars seems like a good start. As a Engineer it seems logical to have redundancy for our civilization. Its not about being humanish. Sure there are other problems to solve, but there are 7 billion people on Earth and people might have a different calling. We can handle different problems concurrently.
- rayvy 8y ago> Human beings are explorers Um and why is that exactly? The rest of your comment is pretty off base from the parent, so I won't address.