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Mars Colonies and Class Warfare (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: An argument about class warfare has broken out over the notion of a commercial Mars colony. It started when Elon Musk, who is said to be planning to retire on the Red Planet, mused that World War III could ruin his plans to settle Mars by destroying the Earth or at least damaging civilization sufficiently that space exploration has to be put off indefinitely, Newsweek, taking up the theme of another sort of planetary disaster, accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.
Elon Musk didn't cause global warming. Why does being rich automatically obligate him to solve other people's problems for them?
If he can afford to escape the consequences of business decisions that have been in the works all over the world and since long before he was born, then he is within his rights to do so.
Time Magazine suggests that Elon Musk and other billionaires will abandon earth and live on the surface of Jupiter.. wait, Jupiter doesn't have a surface..
"You got to love it when idiotic journalism bad sci-fi meets" -Yoda.
The only thing I would agree on is that WW3 may well be around the corner. For some unknowably weird reason, there's a load of politicians who seem to consider that a better option than the status quo.
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Of all the rich people he's on the short list of actually doing something about on the up-curve of his wealth. Plenty of people come to Jesus after they have a couple billion. Up vote on the rather be dead. Mars would be a shitty place to live for a long time. The writer is just being a hyperbolic pric to carry some other related point.
We don't have any hint of terra forming tech today
Are you kidding? One of the biggest and first steps in terraforming Mars is to introduce massive amounts of carbon and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere to warm it up on the global scale. We are experts in that field because we are doing it to our own planet at an alarming rate.
Since we know that there is water on Mars, everything else is duck soup. Transplanting plants, especially algae, ferns, trees can turn massive amounts of carbon dioxide and water into oxygen on the long term. It is a fairly simple and straightforward process but it takes a long time.
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This may be some kind of bizarre nerdy entertainment, but it will never happen. Ever.
A little over a century ago there was a person saying that very thing about heavier than air flight.
Unlike so many others, nerds know how to make their dreams come true.
Really? And how is the human body going to survive on 38% of Earths gravity??? Idiotic. How are you going to build those "sealed buildings" and "greenhouses"? From material from the Home Depots on Mars?? Science fiction is fun to read, but it is FICTION. We cannot live on Mars. We have evoloved to live on Earth.
The human body can survive in 0% of Earths Gravity (at least for 14 months), so it's not like the body won't adapt to lower gravity. There may be some long term side effects that shorten (or lengthen) lifespan, but hey, living on Mars is risky enough that a shorter lifespan is practically guaranteed.
However long-term life on Mars may preclude ever returning to Earth's gravity, though it's possible that some rehabilitation and slow re-acclimation on the long trip home may make it possible to return.
I think it's technically possible to send people to Mars over the next decade or two, but probably not economically feasible for a billionaire or two, the Apollo program reportedly cost $170B in today's dollars, which is "only" around 30% of one years of the USA's military spending. So redirecting 20% of the military budget toward the project for 10 years should be enough money to pay for it.
Though right now, there's not much reason to do so except for the novelty factor - a life-extinguishing global disaster is pretty unlikely in the next century, and we have more pressing problems to solve on earth. But eventually it probably makes sense to colonize off-planet, just for redundancy.
A functioning Stellarator or any other working fusion system would cure most of the radiation problem (make your own magnetic field).
I've been wondering about the practicality of laying a planet-circling coil, superconducting would be nice too, for the purposes of covering the whole planet with a sufficient field. Would be easier to try on the Moon first.
I asked because the poster made the effort to express on a public forum their opinion that the current class structure is unfairly under attack. This would fit for someone who was a member of a privileged group that benefits from this structure, in which case I would take his +5-insightful comment with a large grain of salt. It has nothing to do with the clueless hack.
The first few generations will have issues, but evolution will adapt to the lower gravity with each new generation.
Really, no, it won't. Not on any time scale that we would ever notice. It would take hundreds of generations for natural selection to work its magic with regard to this.
Depends on whether or not some people can adapt quickly to the low-G environment and how quickly those that can't handle the environment die off (or otherwise not allowed to breed). If 100,000 people are sent up, and only the top 20% of adapters are allowed to breed, then even the 2nd generation could be quite well adapted