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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.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
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.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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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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.
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.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
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.