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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.
Living on Mars would suck, personally I'd rather be dead than Red.
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Robert Heinlein would be proud.
I thought the Martians were coming here because they messed-up their planet?!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If you're rich enough to go to Mars, you're rich enough to have a bloody brilliant life on earth, whether it's ravaged or not!
Newsweek... 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.
You can jack up global warming until every single molecule of polar ice melts, and on top of that you can detonate every single nuclear warhead in existence, and Earth will still be an infinitely more habitable place than Mars. So the accusation of abandoning Earth to become a hellhole while billionaires live it up on Mars is stupid beyond belief.
Mind you I'm totally in favor of Elon or somebody sending people to Mars, but that would be as an exploration and human achievement rather than some bullshit class warfare thing.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Some people are locked into seeing everything as a function of class, leaving out about 95% of human existence.
And... Newsweek is still around?
If those morons think that a small increase in temperature is worse than living on a barren empty planet with no air, water, or infrastructure... maybe we should send them there first so they can see what it's like. I hope they enjoy the many months traveling there eating rehydrated space food in a tiny room.
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Mankind is on the verge of its greatest accomplishment, to be executed by the bravest and most hardworking of us. Those that go will be miserable, scraping by on unending work and luck. If they get a foothold on the first thru tenth attempt (pre-foothold colonies will be likely wiped out, every inhabitant dead), a solution may emerge for economic transit and eventually tourism. Going early won't be pleasant--that will take decades. Once it's pleasant, it will become affordable to the middle class a few years later.
Instead of celebrating these people, these children lash out, in a fit of short-sightedness, envy, and the weight of their personal failures.
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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.
Seems more likely to me that Musk is going to Mars to get as far as possible from the idiot who wrote this piece and the likes of him.
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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Mars. ...good life... ... Mars... Good Life... MARS. ...LIVING THE GOOD LIFE. On FREAKING MARS.
Isn't Mars a WASTELAND?
Is this a really unusual definition of "good life"? Or maybe a complete misunderstanding of what Mars is like?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Mars aint the kind of place to raise your kids
. .
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.
Exactly my reaction to TFA. He expresses the desire to spend tens or even hundreds of Gigabucks to retire on a hellishly inhospitable planet, with little likelihood of return, and their reaction is to call him privileged and accuse him of going Galt?
There are so many better places on Earth to abandon the proles and go "live the good life," without having to spend all of your fortunes on getting there.
I can see the fnords!
Gravity is 0.38 g. Radiation and lack of oxygen are handled by living underground in sealed buildings, food grown in sealed surface greenhouses.
Expensive. Difficult. Not fun. Possible.
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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.
We don't have any hint of terra forming tech today, we won't have a functional one within a lifetime.
In 1940, the same could be said about sending a man to the Moon, but we did it in just under 30 years. Just because we don't know how to do it now doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it will take generations to learn it.
Consider: if we can send people to Mars safely, we know how to keep them alive in hard vacuum, and Mars already has an atmosphere, and the radiation levels there aren't going to be any worse than those in space. It's quite possible that the colony will either domed or underground, with no need for terraforming.
Look at any virtual fly-by, there's not any safe plot of land large enough to hold a bed, let alone a house.
If you're talking about craters, they're currently believed to be millions of years old at least, and there's no evidence that meteors have been a significant hazard since before mankind evolved.
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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.
Is there any proof we can't survive on 38% gravity? Sure, coming back to earth after an extended stay would be problematic but your body would adjust just fine to weaker gravity and if you were never planning on leaving then this isn't a problem.
Raw materials are also not a problem. Again, there is no proof that mars doesn't have the same elements as earth.
Even radiation isn't a problem if you're ok living underground because admittedly your quality of life won't be much different underground on mars.
Which is probably the biggest problem with mars. Who wants to live there? Would you give up waterfalls, rivers, grass, outdoors forever?
I've heard of people retiring to a cruise ship but even they get to leave the ship and breath fresh air.
Even if we manage to wall off a few square miles, would you want to live in a 2 mile square with a bunch of other people and never be able to leave ever?
If we really want to colonize mars then step one is to send hundreds of robots and have them build cities, domes, pools, rivers, etc... before anyone arrives (kindof like what China is doing building cities where noone lives).
"Of all the ways to avoid "the ravages of global warming", going to Mars would be the nuttiest I've heard."
Not forgetting the stupid notion that rich people need to go anywhere to avoid "the ravages of global warming" when the last working air conditioner, the last gallon of oil and the last kobe cow sirloin will be for them anyway.
Upward mobility is no myth. Some of us have experienced it firsthand.
Although it tends to be much more common with the newcomers. They tend to have less emotional baggage dragging them down and haven't been indoctrinated into the usual liberal excuses for not trying to fend for yourself.
THAT right there is why we should never shut out immigrants. They make up for the fat entitled slobs that blame everyone else for their own shortcomings.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Last I checked, we've increased the atmospheric thickness of Earth by 0%. Call me when we can make it 100x thicker.
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Colonizing Mars is doable with current tech. Terra forming that rock is theoretically doable, in about 10,000 years. But no matter what tech level you have, fixing the Earth is at least 2 orders of magnitude easier by every metric. If the Billionaires are looking for somewhere to go, an orbital hab would be a better bet. Just attach engines and you can move whenever the peons threaten you.
Under no circumstances would I ever put my food source on the surface of Mars. Solar panels feeding grow lights for the tunnels is the way to go. Eliminates radiation mutation hazards, cheaper to construct(no glass under pressure), lower maintenance(same), and you can use the greenery as budget parkland. As for gravity, if you make a cone structure (pointy end down) and spin it, you get centripetal gravity. Just match the angle of the cone to the spin rate and you can have full earth gravity.
No, in fact, it's the exact opposite: incomes go up as people get older. It should also be obvious why: as people get older, they gain more experience and advance in their careers, so they get salary raises. You have to be utterly disconnected from economic life not to understand such a basic fact. http://tinyurl.com/pebklkm
True. But the argument progressives and people like Sanders make is that "the 1%" actually constitute "the ruling class", that the problem is money, and that the problem can be fixed by redistribution and taxation. That argument is obviously bullshit given the intragenerational income mobility we see.
The US may or may not have some other form of "ruling class" that isn't rooted in money. You're welcome to make an argument for that. There certainly are such ruling classes in Europe, in countries with much more economic equality and higher relative upward mobility.
I did better: I immigrated to the US and experienced upward mobility that people in other countries can only dream of. People like you strike me as whiny, greedy, and ignorant because you simply lack any appreciation of how well the US works.
The statistics that people cite on intergenerational mobility and comparing it between countries are bullshit; they are based on relative mobility, and that's high in countries with government-imposed equality, for all the wrong reasons.
The first few generations will have issues, but evolution will adapt to the lower gravity with each new generation. The biggest issue future Martians will face, even if we manage to terraform it, is these decedents probably won't be able to return to Earth due to various changes in bone density, muscle mass, etc. The biggest issue with any terraforming is the lack of a magnetosphere.
Except 100+ years ago heavier than air flight was occurring already every day, by birds. You don't see anything flying to Mars. The complexity in question is very different.
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Colonizing Mars is doable with current tech.
We can't even get there with current tech. There's no way to keep a person healthy after a voyage that long, let alone on the surface. The only way we could make a colony work, even if we could magically transport millions of tons of material, is to tunnel deep underground. At which point: why? What would be different from being deep underground on Earth, aside from the whole "not sure if low gravity is eventually fatal" thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Or maybe even try something similar on a spherical orbital station that only looks like a moon.
That's no moon...
Haha. That's exactly what my girlfriend used to tell me. She's a teacher and experienced it first hand. Poor immigrants come, live 5 families to a room, work hard, start a business, make a better life. Have kids who look around wondering why they have to work and complain about not having Porches then join a gang and threaten to turn in parents to immigration if forced to do homework.
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
Can we go back to when being cynical for cynicism's sake wasn't cool?
Your use of the phrase 'adapters' isn't a good indication of your understanding of evolutionary biology. Individual lifeforms don't adapt, at least not in a useful sense, what you'd want would be candidates who are inherently more viable in the environment. Given the universality of gravity on earth it is very unlikely that there is a considerable difference in viability in low gravity between individuals, unlike for example disease resistance.
I'd put the exhaust port leading to the heart of the reactor in the coil's trench. I've a feeling that will be pretty secure.
I'd put the exhaust port leading to the heart of the reactor in the coil's trench. I've a feeling that will be pretty secure.
Make sure it's no more than 2 meters wide for added security. That's no bigger than a womp rat, and we all know how hard it is to hit them.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Except 100+ years ago heavier than air flight was occurring already every day, by birds. You don't see anything flying to Mars. The complexity in question is very different.
Several of our machines are operating on or around Mars right now. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, MAVEN, India's Mars orbiter, Mars exploration rover Opportunity, and the Curiosity rover.
In a pinch, we could send people to Mars using a similar architecture to some of these robotic vehicles (a scaled up Curiosity entry and descent system and a typical lander type landing would work, though inefficiently... supersonic retropropulsion is much better and much more scalable). We've proven that we can handle the complexity.
Self-sufficiency will take the rest of this century to establish, but there's absolutely no question that sending people to Mars (and back) is possible, and we've proven that we have the technology to do so (and we could've done it in the 1970s, though I'm not sure it would've been a good idea to do an unsustainable Apollo-on-Mars then... reusable vehicles are critically important for scalability and long-term viability... if you develop a reusable architecture, your upfront costs aren't THAT much different than an expendable Mars architecture, but instead of just a handful of individuals, you can send thousands or even tens of thousands and, over the long-term, build the infrastructure necessary for a self-sufficient Mars colony).
So unlike your bird example, we've established this is possible with our technology and that we could've probably done it 40 years ago if we had really wanted to.