Comment by foxglacier

1 month ago

That's why Musk's plan it to send a lot more so they can keep the human species going if human life on earth is destroyed by, say, a meteorite.

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foxglacier

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thrance  1 month ago

Sure, his ketamin-addled brain has been promising us that there would be millions of humans on Mars very soon for years now. That doesn't make it real. And that does not explain either how they'd survive, or even how they'd get there in the first place. Sending one ship to Mars is something, sending thousands is unfeasible in this century.

Also, I don't believe they'd ever be auto-sufficient, because of the aforementioned qualities of Mars: anoxic, sterile, radioactive and subzero. They'd certainly never thrive. More probably, they'd live in a kind of inescapable company-town, millions of miles away from the nearest jurisdiction, at the mercy of a guy known for brutalizing his workers, where going on strike means you probably just die. Sounds like absolute hell.

So, unfeasible, unrealistic, pointless. You can do much more good for humanity by investing here on Earth, obviously.

IshKebab  1 month ago

A completely unrealistic plan though, to anyone who has thought about it for half a second.

A mars colony is probably doable. A self-sustaining mars colony? For the length of time it would take a completely devastated Earth to recover? Absolutely impossible, at least with our current technology.

Think about the level of supply chain you'd need to get something like a computer or a solar panel made on Mars. Where do you get plastic? Iron ore? Copper? Pure fantasy.

It would still be cool to have a colony on mars.

  • foxglacier  19 days ago

    I don't know what it would take to be self-sufficient but neither do you. Eventually humans will have to have a sustainable presence off Earth if we don't want our species to go extinct. Why can't somebody give it a try? Maybe we don't quite have the technology for it yet but it doesn't hurt to have a good go at it. Extinction would be a real tragedy because we might be the only hope of intelligent life in the whole universe ever. It's incredible how not a single other species we know of even comes close despite millions of years of evolution.