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I think the idea of colonizing Mars only makes sense in the head of a teenager who read to much bad sf. Our whole idea of spaceships crossing empty space and fo
by Udik 7y ago
I think the idea of colonizing Mars only makes sense in the head of a teenager who read to much bad sf. Our whole idea of spaceships crossing empty space and founding colonies on other planets is just a projection on the past successes of the age of discoveries, when actual ships crossed the oceans and reached new continents. But those continents were perfectly habitable, with tons of resources, plants and animals that forever changed the way we live. While Mars is utterly barren, inhospitable and dead.
On the other hand, I admire Musk for being a great engineer and businessman with the dreams of a teenager; even if the idea of thriving colonies on Mars is a cheap fantasy, I understand that you need to set yourself exciting goals to drive your ambition.
- heavyset_go 7y agoMusk isn't an engineer.
- varjag 7y agoAbout time you edit his Wikipedia page then.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI always wonder what threshold people use for this term . This is a site where a person with 4 weeks bootcamp experience call themselves a software engineer
- heavyset_go 7y agoSomeone who graduated from an accredited engineering program and is a licensed professional engineer, neither of which Musk did or is.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoJust listen to 15 minutes him answering questions in any but the most mainstream (thus: time-limited, chunked into 10-seconds slots) channel and you will see that he has most accurate technical information and numbers and tradeoffs and materials etc. in his head than most engineers with 10 year experience. Say what you want about the stock price, about whether you agree with his policies, about his personality, but if you say something so blatantly obviously wrong as "he is not an engineer", it just tells everyone that you haven't done even a 15 minutes of proper research about him.
- heavyset_go 7y agoMusk neither graduated from an accredited engineering program, nor is he is a licensed professional engineer. Being able to convince someone on the comments section of a website that he's an engineer isn't the same thing as having credentials or a license.
- fsloth 7y agoThere is no fundamental law of nature discovered so far that would stop us from colonizing other worlds. The problems seem to be related to either a) financial b) psychological c) engineering or d) physiological domains. Once a human society learns how to thrive on a single colony there is no reason it could not spread across the planet. You are right of course that interplanetary colonization is completely different thing from the European colonization of Americas. But it's quite silly to think it is childish. The thing is, we don't know what it would be like. So you could be proven right ("what a silly idea this was, let's go home") or you could be proven wrong (it turns out humans can thrive elsewhere and we become an interplanetary species).