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The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are bein

The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are being planned. Idiots are just too horny for human space exploration after decades of Star Trek/War consumption.

southernplaces7 3y ago
I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid. What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time. There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    There's still nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed. The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  It's not just far harder than any previous wave of colonisation. The rewards aren't obvious. A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane. We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically. IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.
  - southernplaces7 3y ago
    >But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane. Very much untrue, at least in part. The solar system, including the asteroids, moon and other bodies, is absolutely, insanely loaded with valuable minerals and materials to a degree that makes what the old colonial powers sought in the New World and Africa pale in comparison, it's just extremely difficult and expensive to reach, for now, so on the second part of your comment, you're correct. However, it's worth noting that the technology for extraction absolutely would scale down in cost over time to the point of space mining being as routinely profitable and practical as mining on earth. I don't like comparing space exploration to the fundamentally cruel and exploitative schemes of Earth's governments during the colonial periods but even they at first had to deal with high costs and little benefit, until they developed scale. Humanity could do the same thing beyond the earth, and without all the grotesque moral failures of destroying whole human cultures in the process.
ben_w 3y ago
If Columbus hadn't been a wilful idiot by taking the smallest possible calculation for the diameter of the Earth and the largest available guess for how wide Asia was, he (like everyone else of his era) would have known his galleon couldn't make a trip long enough to sail west to India, and wouldn't have accidentally discovered the Americas in process of making this mistake. I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars. Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth. [0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  I think Amerigo Vespucci did a better job of it, but somehow he's less famous. (despite -rightly- having two continents named after him)
barrysteve 3y ago
The world is completely surveilled and you're surprised people want to leave? I can't get off this authoritarian nightmare rock soon enough.
- bluescrn 3y ago
  There’s not likely to be much freedom to be had in space or on Mars, in a situation where life support systems are fragile and need much more protection from careless/reckless individuals.
- bravetraveler 3y ago
  Whoever establishes another planet (or space) is likely to be rather authoritarian... Think "company town" but so, so much worse. The desolate environment, required infrastructure, and costs make me see exploitation in that future... not freedom. This nightmare rock has abundance and greed. We've struggled with "easy mode"! Space doesn't exactly improve that; hellish rocks with nothing but our greed. Whoever delivers has the authority! Even with a more optimistic take, I don't like it. Posit that we have a nice overlord. They provide and expect nothing back. Given the environment, they'll determine that surveillance is paramount to safety of The Dome. We can't have someone spacing everybody.
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    Yes but there is no requirement to surveil someone's bedroom, when their life totally depends on your agricultural handouts. A hard reset on surveillance is required. We have to build housing that cannot be surveilled, blacklist by default. Only whitelist approved sensors.
    - bravetraveler 3y ago
      Ah, but you see, they will surveil your bedroom... perhaps even assign a mate! To sustain The Dome, we must all have children here. Flying them up is mighty expensive! Dereliction thins the gene pool and will be punished.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
Do you live in the United States of America? Australia? Founded by those idiots who want to explore. Alternately: UK? Spain? Portugal? Netherlands? Got rich on above said idiots. Maybe you live in the western USA? Maybe you have Polynesian Ancestry? Or Scandinavian? Have you ever taken a trans-atlantic flight? Ordered anything from overseas? Made a long-distance phone call? Used GPS? You know what, let's have a few idiots who go exploring in every generation.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  Don't forget to explain - in detail - how to build a stable, self-sustaining off-world ecosystem with adequate food, air, water, and shelter out of rocks, energy, and expensive and very irregular imports. You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain. "Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically. Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.
  - epups 3y ago
    Yeah, the comparison to colonization doesn't really makes much sense to me. Using 16th century tech, you could expect to have a profitable trip pretty much every time you managed to come back alive, and you did not have to deal with bringing your own life support systems. With our technology, colonizing Mars is a much, much harder task, which has no foreseeable economic benefits for decades if not centuries.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      Heh, I also named some 20th century exploration examples. (eg. Charles Lindbergh's first Trans-Atlantic flight was only in 1927) Current investment in space endeavors in eg. the USA is around 0.1% GDP. Even if you double it (or 10x it), that's not going to break the bank. If we take your optimistic estimate (profitable after a few decades) it might just be a risk that's worth it today, on a nation-scale. (Edit: unfortunately I couldn't find good GDP figures for the 1600's , but taking investments in eg british and dutch east india companies vs a guesstimated GDP, I also got to around 0.1% +/- 1 OOM, which seems like a reasonable estimate of exploration costs as % GDP , and thus modern investment levels seem to be reasonably in line with that. )

southernplaces7 3y ago

I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid. What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time. There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
> There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  There's still nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. Just because certain groups of people have beliefs about the "wrongness" of something, doesn't mean that they're in the least bit rational or need to be given weight. The uh space, beyond the Earth is literally a blasted wasteland created from ancient formation violence. Nothing we do in that sterile, radioactive, chemically toxic vastness of planets, rocks, ice and open void would by any sane definition be comparable to some sort of ecocide on earth, where extremely precious flora and fauna are destroyed. The philosophy of degrowth is entirely a subjective moral view, no more morally valid than a philosophy of more growth, and humanity is emphatically not a virus, it just is, like any other complex species on Earth.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
It's not just far harder than any previous wave of colonisation. The rewards aren't obvious. A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane. We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically. IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.
- southernplaces7 3y ago
  >But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane. Very much untrue, at least in part. The solar system, including the asteroids, moon and other bodies, is absolutely, insanely loaded with valuable minerals and materials to a degree that makes what the old colonial powers sought in the New World and Africa pale in comparison, it's just extremely difficult and expensive to reach, for now, so on the second part of your comment, you're correct. However, it's worth noting that the technology for extraction absolutely would scale down in cost over time to the point of space mining being as routinely profitable and practical as mining on earth. I don't like comparing space exploration to the fundamentally cruel and exploitative schemes of Earth's governments during the colonial periods but even they at first had to deal with high costs and little benefit, until they developed scale. Humanity could do the same thing beyond the earth, and without all the grotesque moral failures of destroying whole human cultures in the process.

ben_w 3y ago

If Columbus hadn't been a wilful idiot by taking the smallest possible calculation for the diameter of the Earth and the largest available guess for how wide Asia was, he (like everyone else of his era) would have known his galleon couldn't make a trip long enough to sail west to India, and wouldn't have accidentally discovered the Americas in process of making this mistake. I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars. Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth. [0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion

Kim_Bruning 3y ago
I think Amerigo Vespucci did a better job of it, but somehow he's less famous. (despite -rightly- having two continents named after him)

barrysteve 3y ago

The world is completely surveilled and you're surprised people want to leave? I can't get off this authoritarian nightmare rock soon enough.

bluescrn 3y ago
There’s not likely to be much freedom to be had in space or on Mars, in a situation where life support systems are fragile and need much more protection from careless/reckless individuals.
bravetraveler 3y ago
Whoever establishes another planet (or space) is likely to be rather authoritarian... Think "company town" but so, so much worse. The desolate environment, required infrastructure, and costs make me see exploitation in that future... not freedom. This nightmare rock has abundance and greed. We've struggled with "easy mode"! Space doesn't exactly improve that; hellish rocks with nothing but our greed. Whoever delivers has the authority! Even with a more optimistic take, I don't like it. Posit that we have a nice overlord. They provide and expect nothing back. Given the environment, they'll determine that surveillance is paramount to safety of The Dome. We can't have someone spacing everybody.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  Yes but there is no requirement to surveil someone's bedroom, when their life totally depends on your agricultural handouts. A hard reset on surveillance is required. We have to build housing that cannot be surveilled, blacklist by default. Only whitelist approved sensors.
  - bravetraveler 3y ago
    Ah, but you see, they will surveil your bedroom... perhaps even assign a mate! To sustain The Dome, we must all have children here. Flying them up is mighty expensive! Dereliction thins the gene pool and will be punished.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

Do you live in the United States of America? Australia? Founded by those idiots who want to explore. Alternately: UK? Spain? Portugal? Netherlands? Got rich on above said idiots. Maybe you live in the western USA? Maybe you have Polynesian Ancestry? Or Scandinavian? Have you ever taken a trans-atlantic flight? Ordered anything from overseas? Made a long-distance phone call? Used GPS? You know what, let's have a few idiots who go exploring in every generation.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
Don't forget to explain - in detail - how to build a stable, self-sustaining off-world ecosystem with adequate food, air, water, and shelter out of rocks, energy, and expensive and very irregular imports. You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain. "Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically. Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.
- epups 3y ago
  Yeah, the comparison to colonization doesn't really makes much sense to me. Using 16th century tech, you could expect to have a profitable trip pretty much every time you managed to come back alive, and you did not have to deal with bringing your own life support systems. With our technology, colonizing Mars is a much, much harder task, which has no foreseeable economic benefits for decades if not centuries.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    Heh, I also named some 20th century exploration examples. (eg. Charles Lindbergh's first Trans-Atlantic flight was only in 1927) Current investment in space endeavors in eg. the USA is around 0.1% GDP. Even if you double it (or 10x it), that's not going to break the bank. If we take your optimistic estimate (profitable after a few decades) it might just be a risk that's worth it today, on a nation-scale. (Edit: unfortunately I couldn't find good GDP figures for the 1600's , but taking investments in eg british and dutch east india companies vs a guesstimated GDP, I also got to around 0.1% +/- 1 OOM, which seems like a reasonable estimate of exploration costs as % GDP , and thus modern investment levels seem to be reasonably in line with that. )