Comment by aeturnum
1 day ago
I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
Doubled or tripled NASA's budget? NASA has spent 32 BILLION on SLS with nothing to show for it. Each launch is expected to cost 2.5 BILLION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System.
Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.
> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this.
Starship does not exist.
Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO.
The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship.
They are impressive, but are not Starship.
They are called Starship, but are not Starship.
Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist.
What I am saying is that today, right now, Starship does not exist and SLS does.
You implied that Starship does exist, and is cheaper.
Nobody, not you, not me, not Lord Ketamine, can predict when it will exist or how much it will cost with any degree of accuracy.
I genuinely, sincerely, and earnestly WANT Starship to exist, but as of today, April 24th, 2025 it does not.
We can argue technicalities all day long but to me, this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGiNKcVSek
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For one, where is Starship and when did it last launch?
For another, this hypothetical spacecraft (which does not yet exist) would not be wherever it is in terms of completion had NASA not existed.
1. More recently than SLS :) 2. Agree 100%.
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100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.
that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.
i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.
100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.
It's also particularly awkward to land on, as it has just enough atmosphere to be annoying, but not enough to be particularly helpful. Most Mars landings have involved some sort of ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine or other (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_crane_(landing_system) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder#Entry,_descent... ) which would not be viable for humans (and were only arguably viable for the probes they were used for; the risk of failure was high).
Add to that a soil and dust that's toxic to humans. Our biology, unsurprisingly, is only compatible with a single planet.
We purposefully decided not to settle there socially, yet we have settled there permanently with research and military stations.
Just as we will with Mars.
And yes we grow things there, even if just green onions and herbs.
Not to mention the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.
100 years is beyond pessimistic. We could easily have settled Mars with 1970s tech.
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Have you read about the natural conditions on Mars?
I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.
I think you are both on different pages about settlement vs just a visit.
Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.
If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.
If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.
Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.
Eh, it's a reasonable prior. The timeline is "it will never happen" until the leap forward happens that makes it "within 2 years." Basically the same as air flight.
You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.
It doesn't require a leap forward, we could put boots on the ground with 1990s tech.
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100 years optimistically?
We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.
We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.
It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.
If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".
Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.
Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.
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Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.
I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
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This is a dumb argument. We are doing it now, already, no crazy budget explosions needed. Just some medium expansions of existing projects.
Orion is going to send humans past the moon this year, and could theoretically send humans to mars not much further out than that. It is literally on the Lockheed Martin website that they would like to send humans to mars sometime in the 2030s, provided they can get the funding.
I'm not involved in the project any longer, but this has been the ideal vision of the project since the mid 2010s. Currently the plan is to put people on the moons of mars, as we have no way of getting them back if we actually put people on the surface of mars.
Rockets are the easy part. More:
The Shape of a Mars Mission: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...
Why Not Mars: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.
Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.
>actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future
I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution.
People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime.
Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.
There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6
Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.
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These articles which are little more than blind scarequotes peppered with ad hominems invite little more meaningful discussion than more ad hominems. What is the value of a comments section filled with little but "this is stupid and anyone who believes it is a snake oil salesman"?
> Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that,
"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.
We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.
I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.
> low-information escapism
What a great way to describe it.
It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.
Why "of course" you support colonizing mars? What's your reasoning?
>wants to get paid for the idea of the future today
One response (also by an abundance crowd?) to a similar sentiment:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/serbia-limits-academics-...
"Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day"
Getting paid before delivery is clearly an Elon Musk strategy and in some cases it does mean that he (Tesla) will be able to deliver but he's clearly full of shit with crazy ideas like living on Mars because the Earth is doomrf or whatever. BS does also bring money or fame or whatever sometimes.
There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.
Well said, I can’t imagine what the perfect tech company to the NyT journalist is, I assume it is something run by committee that uses 100’s of their journalists opinions to make every simple decision.
Most of the criticism on display here is the outrageous, implausible lies that the tech industry leaders are telling to stupid people who believe it for propaganda purposes to avoid regulation and scrutiny.
None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.
No you