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Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars
by thisisbrians 7y ago
Something that this article hints at but seems not to explicitly state: there is near-zero economic incentive for anyone to establish or occupy a colony on Mars, and even if there is some incentive, it is not worth the cost. Just the sum of money required to fly the people there alone would be absolutely staggering, and ironically, would create enough greenhouse gas emissions from the launch vehicles to put our environmental issues here on Earth into an even bleaker perspective.
Halting the damage we are doing to our own planet is urgent and important. Colonizing Mars is way less of either.
- markonen 7y agoGetting, say, a million people to escape velocity would not be significant in terms of greenhouse emissions, compared to the ~8 trillion revenue passenger kilometres flown annually (which itself is a tiny fraction of global emissions). Also, if you assume that those colonists are not coming back, their exodus is likely to be carbon negative for Earth.
- bsmith 7y agoExcellent points. I want to follow up with some back-of-the-envelope math on this later, if I have time. My intuition was that it takes a whole heck of a lot of fuel to get someone to even LEO velocity. Would love to see how that corresponds with air travel.
- rland 7y agoThis is the true reason. Although, we should have the ideological goal of colonization, as a failsafe option to prevent extinction. Every now and again, people are able to organize themselves for a goal beyond economic gain (which seems like a foreign idea in our capitalist cultural context)