Mars Attacks: How Elon Musk's plans to colonize Mars threaten Earth.
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SpaceX? They got billions to get us to Mars. They never go beyond the super easy part in rocketry, low earth orbit.
okay lol
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My conspiracy is that Musk thinks he'll get to Mars more likely if he aligns with the Republicans, and he acts so super stupid on purpose to get along with them.
... and it has landed him a top position in government so far
the comments about slashing social security are definitely unhinged IMHO (so i'm definitely not supporting that) but i'm european and we have more appreciation for social safety nets i would say. america is more isolationist, so maybe that's just "america being america".
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what i don't get is why people are focusing on the amount of ecosystem that SpaceX displaces while completely ignoring that literally anything else also replaces ecosystem. City? used to be forest? Parking lot? used to be prairie. Suburbs? you guessed it
everything was an ecosystem before modern humans got there. i don't get the particular outrage over SpaceX.
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Eh, none of that is something one casually develops for going to Mars. Is tech that fundamentally transforms the nature of society on Earth and being human, and again, is way more impactful than going to Mars.
Again, the argument I'm trying to make is that, by the time one can settle Mars without supplies from earth, you mind as well get your robotic swarm to make space habitats or something.
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Actually, they have launched deep space NASA missions. The Europa clipper went to Jupiter on a falcon heavy just last year.
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Again, the argument I'm trying to make is that, by the time one can settle Mars without supplies from Earth
Well, that's not exactly the goal. No nation is really self-sufficient in modern society. Everyone engages in trade. So the question is really, when will a space colony become profitable or maintainable? And that's trickier to answer, because it isn't "not for hundreds of years", but it also isn't now, it's somewhere in between.
Cheaper access to space would change the equation immensely. Being cheaper to resupply would mean the colony wouldn't have to be as profitable to be sustainable. In-situ resource utilisation (using water found off of earth for drinking, oxygen and fuel) will also make an enormous difference as it would reduce the amount of supplies needed from earth. (This is incidentally one of the main goals of NASA's Artemis program, to figure out how to utilize water resources on the moon)
It was the same situation when Europeans settled the Americas, at first it was just a money suck. Entire colonies were lost, lots of people died, they weren't really prepared. But then they started to figure out what crops worked there, how to survive harsh winters, etc. Once they figured out how to make the most of this new land, they thrived. Unfortunately, the way they treated the locals was pretty horrific. Fortunately, we're pretty certain there aren't any locals on the moon or Mars.
Truth be told, I think a Mars colony won't happen for quite some time, but I believe a moon colony will certainly happen before 2100. And if we're lucky, maybe since orbital colonies. That's where the future really lies, orbital colonies.
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Well, I would be glad if he would do it in person - and stays there.
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By having an earth that sustains the peasantry and actually working on being able to live on Mars so they can look down on them without suffocating?
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I think the (ideal) future looks more like an accelerated Orion's Arm, where humanity-changing technologies take over.
Again that’s what I’m getting at. We will never be colonizing Mars as squishy humans… We‘ll be augmented, modified, interfaced with mechanized AI, uploaded, maybe even just mechanical intelligences, something like that. We'll be using nuclear propulsion, at least. There will be no need to worry about drinking water or breathing oxygen because that will be irrelevant.
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yeah i know, that's why i said "lol"
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Many (American) folks of mine, even more conservative ones, tend to tune out familiar news sources because they're so bad. Others are really glued to Facebook or whatever their feed of choice is.
TBH I think America (on average) just lives in a stronger information dystopia than Europe. People here don't connect social security cuts to them, or even know about Trump's/Musk's statements on it.
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This is some sci-fi fanfic level shit lmao
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Colonizing the bottom of the ocean would be orders of magnitude easier. Or the South Pole. Or Kīlauea’s open lava pit.
While it is true that you have different sets of problems to sole, nope, they are only cheaper to get to, not necessary easier to colonize, except maybe the South Pole where you just need to build something that only need to withstand the cold, which is easy enough and you could go outside without a space suite or something similar.
The problem with colonizing Mars is the cost, which have as a consequence the cost of everything you send to that place.
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esla… How many new models were made since he got in?
None. But without Tesla you would not have neither all the other models from other car companies. Tesla just started it and demostrated that it is possible to produce an electric car with a decent look (and better that some ICE cars in my opinion) at a time when most of the electric cars done by other company were just some ugly proof of concept (excluding a very few cases) to show at this or that event.
And I read somewhere that what Musk wanted from Tesla was to set the stage, as far as I remember he said that it was ok if Tesla bankrupt after setting the stage.SpaceX? They got billions to get us to Mars. They never go beyond the super easy part in rocketry, low earth orbit. Anything beyond that is where shit gets really hard and we’re still waiting. All I saw was billions of tax dollars wasted in blown up rocket after blown up rocket and SpaceX cheering nluke idiots over a blown up banana.
Considering that everyone else was not able to do even that, I would not call SpaceX a failure. And it is not that NASA did not have its fair number or launch failures, tbh.
You talk about beyond low earth orbit like something way harder, but it not really true. SpaceX put a Tesla in a orbit beyond Mars with a Falcon heavy some years ago, and they still have (and use) the Falcon Heavy.Hell, they obliterated a launchpad because btgey were dumb enough to not understand flame diverters…
True but they were trying to launch a rocket that nobody else even tried to build. I would say it is fair that they make some mistakes.
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No, SpaceX is objectively a failure
It was paid 3 Billion to bring us to Mars by now and by now where are we? If I'm extremely gracious, I'd say we're at 1% of that. At the rate they're going they can barely launch rockets that don't explode, and they still do stupid and dumb stuff and them brag about the minor things that went well while cheering the explosions.
Compare SpaceX to the fucking Apolo program that had to figure out everything from scratch, to do every calculation with a ruler, no good manufacturing techniques and see what they got in a decade. What did SpaceX do in this last decade?
He promised he'd make space travel 10-100 times cheaper and so far he sold it for more expensive after receiving grant after grant.
The guy is a fucking scammer. SpaceX arguably has some good engineers, but that's it. Wake me up when they manage to get a rocket in high earth orbit reliably
