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Bill Nye: We Are Not Going To Live on Mars, Let Alone Turn It Into Earth (usatoday.com)
pgmrdlm writes: Bill Nye says the idea of Mars colonization and terraforming -- making a planet more Earth-like by modifying its atmosphere -- is science fiction. "This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?" Nye said in an interview with USA TODAY. "We can't even take care of this planet where we live, and we're perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet." As for living on Mars permanently: Sorry, Nye says that's not happening either. "People disagree with me on this, and the reason they disagree is because they're wrong," he quipped. The famous science educator and CEO of The Planetary Society appears on National Geographic Channel's series "MARS." While the series explores human beings living on the Red Planet and even mining it, that doesn't mean Nye buys into the idea. For starters, he points to Antarctica, where scientists are stationed even during the harsh winter months but no one lives permanently.
"Nobody goes to Antarctica to raise a family. You don't go there and build a park, there's just no such thing. Nobody's gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians," Nye said. "It's not reasonable because it's so cold. And there is hardly any water. There's absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there's nothing to breathe." Plus living in a dome, then putting on a spacesuit to go outside will get tiring -- fast. "When you leave your dome, you're gonna put on another dome, and I think that will get old pretty quick," he said. "Especially the smell in the spacesuit 00 all the Febreze you can pack, I think it will really help you up there."
"Nobody goes to Antarctica to raise a family. You don't go there and build a park, there's just no such thing. Nobody's gonna go settle on Mars to raise a family and have generations of Martians," Nye said. "It's not reasonable because it's so cold. And there is hardly any water. There's absolutely no food, and the big thing, I just remind these guys, there's nothing to breathe." Plus living in a dome, then putting on a spacesuit to go outside will get tiring -- fast. "When you leave your dome, you're gonna put on another dome, and I think that will get old pretty quick," he said. "Especially the smell in the spacesuit 00 all the Febreze you can pack, I think it will really help you up there."
At the moment we're showing great dexterity in de-terraforming Earth.
I think as long as we don't tackle this one we should be at least careful with prospective terraforming projects.
. . . on the other side of the solar system. Obviously, he is right in the very short term, nobody is moving there today and, likely, not in the next decade or three. Will there be a base on mars in the next century? Maybe. Will we go there to live once we have mastered genetic engineering to adapt to any environment? Duh? We may live on Jupiter. Of course, that might be centuries away, so who gives a fuck?
How can we ever hope to colonize the New World, when we can't even live at peace among ourselves here in continental Europe? The climate experiences wild swings, our ships are not reliable, and the land is populated with murderous savages. I know you all really like Queen Isabella, but this is all just fantasy. There may be riches in the New World, but it will never be worth the time or effort to extract them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Pull your lips off of Bill Nye's asshole for just a moment. Nye is inflammatory and alienates a lot of people who might otherwise be interested in science by mocking them. You don't get people to understand climate change by making them feel stupid or insulting religion, according to another science, i.e. psychology. He's also against nuclear power, which is potentially mankind's near-term best hope to quell CO2 emissions and air pollution. His knowledge is shallow compared to real scientists like Carl Sagan or Neil Degrasse Tyson.
So no, "pretty much" everything he does isn't so great.
Cold? Well, you are going to generate power somehow, and most methods generate plenty of heat as a by-product.
Hardly any water? Well, collect some and keep reusing it. Sounds icky? Well, here on Earth we're doing the same thing, except that the water here has been recycled and reused for millions of years. That's even more icky than anything you'll find on Mars.
Absolutely no food? We've just talked about power, heat and water. If you have those three, you can make/grow food.
Nothing to breathe? There's CO2. There are plants (for growing food, see above). Why shouldn't there be oxygen?
Seriously. Dismissing life on Mars and then talking about the things that are among the easiest? What about radiation, (temporary) dependence on supply flighty that take half a year to arrive, or how to build a production infrastructure (so you can build enough domes that taking a walk won't involve donning a space suit)?
Physics fundamentals dictate that Mars will never resemble Earth, but it's human nature that people will one day live on it in a self-sustaining manner.
We could make Mars Earthlike in all but gravity and the blissfully longer day, but I'm not sure what the point would be. (Sure, that atmosphere would be lost in a million years, but so what?)
I don't think it will ever make sense. It will just be much easier to make huge orbiting habitats for those who want to escape Earth. Starting at big enough to hold 100k-1 million people, these start to make a lot of sense. You get the gravity and atmosphere you want, without the mind-boggling time that terraforming would take.
If we can only get robotic asteroid mining started, so that heavy industry isn't at the bottom of a gravity well, everything else becomes practical. And mostly-self-directed robotic mining equipment no longer sounds like far-fetched SF. More like inevitable loss of all the mining jobs on Earth. Start making millions of tons of rocket fuel in high orbit and suddenly the Solar system is ours for the taking.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Which cuts to the heart of the problem : what exactly is the point of building there? Outside 'well, there is gravity!', the planet doesn't really have much making it worth being there and you end up living in a high cost sealed environment that you might as well just build on earth and cover the walls in pictures of mars.
The fallacy ad hominem (abusive) is "This guy is evil, therefor his claims are wrong." The first post is This guy is irritating; he may or may not be right. Not the same thing.
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You're technically correct, but missing the bigger picture.
Sure, we can't live in Antarctica permanently. But we haven't spent any of the last 200 years there trying to make the outposts there permanent either. So of course we can't.
If we had wanted to, we probably could have. We could have built giant underground farms with grow lights, dropped in a nuclear power plant, built an underground infrastructure, etc. And we could most likely be pretty self-sufficient there, since it's got oxygen and a lot of ice to melt for water. (I'll note that Mars doesn't have either. At least, not relatively pure water ice, not mixed with perchlorates.)
You can't use Antarctica as proof we can't live permanently on Mars since we didn't try to live permanently there. If we had tried and failed, that would be another story.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It isn't. It is actually a reasonable, if incomplete statement. A more robust expression would be that due to the nature of evil, there can be no reliance on Trump. In fact, however, Trump is not simply evil, but a selfish moronic blowhard asshole who is known to lie over even easily disproved matters. Not to mention his tendency to reverse his position based on whatever inanity goes through his brain.
Therefore, you should assume he is wrong until demonstrated otherwise, or even better, ignore him utterly. And you ought to have been doing this twenty years ago.
You should try venturing outside your echo chamber.
And you should try not to make assumptions about people like me.
I evaluate Trump, his surrogates, and his supporters based on whether what they are saying is *FACTUAL* - And whether their actions make sense based on the facts at hand. When Trump spends $120M of taxpayer dollars to dispatch 7000 troops to the southern border - Depriving those troops of their families at Thanksgiving and Christmas - Based on a threat that is not factual, then I judge him on that, because the facts do not support his actions.
The people who *are* in echo chambers are the people who haven't critically evaluated whether sending 7000 troops to the border is a good use of resources, or a stunt to inflame their fears.
That's one of many many many dozens of examples.