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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."
Aside from being cold, barren, and lacking an atmosphere... The place is covered in chemicals that are hazardous to humans. How many people would go to Antarctica if the snow was made of perchlorates.
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.
Because.... SPACEFORCE!
(Go ahead and down rank me. I deserve it. Sorry.)
The moon would require roughly 1,000 comets to terraform. Comets would provide both water, oxygen, and momentum (spin). Due to its weaker gravity, the moon would hold onto its atmosphere for tens of thousands of years.
Moving 1,000 comets seems not too far off from our capabilities today. Reaching the moon is definitely possible - we've done it. The only difficulty is social - as far as I know, we haven't pulled off such a multi-generational project.
. . . 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.
Um, are you high? Perhaps the "Science Guy" should learn a little bit about Mars before talking about it. A large portion of the planet has permafrost at or near the surface.
I'm not actually that much of a Mars advocate, and think the simplicity of using water there is overplayed (people talk about it like it's some sort of pure snow that you just pick up and melt, but it's (mostly) a rock-hard toxic brine mixed with sand and clay) - but come on, if you're going to talk about something, learn the basics.
"Define 'interesting'". "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die?"
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.
There are plenty of places on Earth that we have not set up shop which are still a trillion times more hospitable than Mars. Go 400 km straight north of Ottawa (which in Canadian terms is pretty well next door) and you are in absolute wilderness. It is great country full of rocks, swamps and lakes but living there is hard. Except for a few valley towns, First Nations reserves and settlements, and some mining centres, people are measured in 1s and 10s per 100 square km. And it is pretty much endless. Now look at Mars - it is worse in every way. No air, no plants, no water and winters that are even colder! There is no economic argument for mining Mars when the potential of most of the Canadian Shield, the Australian Outback, and Siberia has not been explored . Even mining the ocean floor would be easier! What we need is to clean up our act here. Use less stuff, make less of a mess and start to work on the over-population problem in a sensible way (whatever that would be).
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
-https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/arthur_c_clarke_100793
It's pretty sad that a guy that used to be the poster-child for science education and the limitless possibilities of the future has become essentially nothing more than a strident leftist mouthpiece.
cf from Bill Nye Saves the World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Yes, that's serious. Not satire.
-Styopa
When somebody says "we" are not "ever" going to do XYZ, it's usually safe to read as, "nobody reading this will be around to see the day when..." I think people generally understand that making predictions about technology 10,000 years from now is impossible, beyond the very basics like speed of light or conservation of energy.
In the interests of unity ... whatever our positions on various issues might be, can we all just agree that the guy is annoying as heck (on anything but very basic science education)? ;)
Yes, and also he's wrong as heck. 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.
Look at all the national claims on Antarctica. The only reason it's not colonized is that it's an international research park by treaty.
You'll get tenure in a fucking week.
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)?
Ahm, it really isn't human nature outside science fiction. When you talk to economists, anthropologists, people who actually study human nature rather than wax poetic about it, the prospects for a martian colony vanish pretty quickly. There just are not enough good reasons to do it outside fulfilling fantasies, and when one actually looks at what is involved in maintaining a self sufficient colony (hint : you can't do it with a couple of 3d printers and some magic mining machines), it gets crushed pretty quickly. The only reason Antarctica remains an international research park is that there has been so little interest in colonizing it. Law and treaties follow what people want to do, and quickly get abandoned if there is a push to do otherwise.
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.
Antarctica is a pretty poor comparison as to why people don't settle there and make a living (there are these things called treaties, and they are worded in such as way to keep it as pristine as possible, limited personal and camp sizes, no mining, etc...).
He's also wrong about how much frozen water is available because truth be told no one knows for a matter of fact yet (but some argue there is actually a great deal locked away below ground).
There is nothing technically preventing people from living in a self sustained manner (from a constant resupply standpoint) so long as they are able to use the natural resources available on mars and have the energy they need (even if water reclamation is a major concern, it is possible to recycle most of the water needed).
Last but not least, exploration and pushing onward to new vistas is one of our defining traits. Ergo, I argue Bill Nye is no longer human. He was abducted after his tv show in the 90's and replaced with one of the prune people of planet asshole.
Find some valuable resource worth extracting* down there and there will be folks living down there. Or find some reason for trade routes to go through there (and need some kind of support) and the same will occur. Otherwise you won't find folks living anywhere. For example, see multitudes of mining towns and interior ports that have come and gone. As for Mars? Right now I don't see either. *Knowledge qualifies. And there are people down there permanently. For some value of "permanent". Just don't tell your neighbor how the book turns out!
Shhhhhhhhh: don't tell them that our 3rd rock has been secretly colonized by denizens from the 2nd rock, who have already begun terraforming...errrr...venusforming(?) it, and have made tremendous progress in that direction in just a bit less than a single century, local time...
(T)he (O)ld (M)an
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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The only way people will move to Mars is if something is actively driving them away from earth.
The way we're polluting the Earth, it could still happen.
We could pollute earth beyond the most dystopian imagination, and it would still be better than living on Mars. Sorry.
I find the Antarctica comparison convincing. Sure we want a scientific base, and a few rich tourists will go. But nobody wants to live there in a permanent colony. It'll be easier and more useful to colonise the bottom of the ocean than Mars.
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
OH MY GOD!
If they came out with a Science show hosted by Dolph Lundgren and Brian May, I believe I'd watch nothing ever but that show.
The immutable question is:
If we don't colonize Mars, the moon, space, or somewhere else other than this rock then what happens to our species when (insert catastrophic event here) hits and we have no backup plan?
We are an apex species, and evolution is not kind to apex species. There is literally an entire planet full of creatures evolving to kill us. It doesn't have to be that either. A giant meteor, nuclear despot, major tectonic event, biological weapon, or an as-yet unknown thing could pound off a big chunk of the population and we are back in the stone age finishing each other off with rocks and sticks.
If not Mars, where?
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.
Why not? Our entire federal government is run by a reality television show host.
I kinda prefer the kids show host better.
He regularly engages them in very thoughtful and respectful arguments. That's why I like him so much more than many others.
You mean like the time he went all-in-for with 'gender identity' and pseudoscience surrounding it? Nah, sorry that shit doesn't fly. Guy's a hack, always was. Mr. Wizard was a far better role model, and challenged people to think. Not only that but encouraged "kitchen top science" you know the stuff that people used to do. Too bad, things are so screwed up that most of the stuff that came even in the early 80's science kits couldn't be sold these days.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.