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Like what? A research outpost? You have to get into a knife fight with your peers to get a grad student who works for ramen on your lab's funding proposal, you
by vkou 4y ago
Like what? A research outpost?
You have to get into a knife fight with your peers to get a grad student who works for ramen on your lab's funding proposal, you're not going to get the amortized cost of a real lab on Mars approved. For that money, there's a thousand languishing research proposals that we should be looking into instead.
There are no economic reasons to go there, either. It's too far away, it's too dangerous, and shipping anything is too much work.
There are no military reasons to go there, either. The military is happy to put weapons in orbit, but Mars is too far away.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> research outpost? Sure. Tourism, too. Many of us have an exploration urge and instinct, and I can't say it's all rational. > there's a thousand languishing research proposals that we should be looking into instead But we're not. People are motivated by passion. I'm not convinced every engineer at SpaceX would be engineering without that mission in their head. I'm also certain the capital being pumped into SpaceX isn't fungible into other research. Mars, Inc. made a good pitch. It got people excited and involved. I get the sour grapes. We all have pet projects we'd prefer be prioritized instead. But I don't see us fighting over a fixed-sized pie.
- kwhitefoot 4y agoGeorge Mallory's reply to why he wanted to climb Everest will do: "Because it's there."
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThe "research outposts" thing was pretty much solved by sending robots to these hostile environments. They have some serious limitations, but it's a lot cheaper to send a few kilograms on a robot than a few hundred kilograms of meat to carry out a few known procedures.