Going to Mars is dumb - 60+ billion dollars for what?

[Mukhrani]

My personal future dystopia theory is that space travel will be used as a kind of euthanasia program. Maybe asteroid mining will eventually be economically 'worth it', but the main problem that space travel will try to resolve is an overburdening of earth. I don't see why TBTB would fund these colossally expensive ships just to create distant colonies on earth-like planets that run the risk of eventually rebelling against them. I think it's far more likely that they would use the 'space program' as a way to skim insane amounts of money off the top. They would build a big shiny ship, some sort of interstellar ark, and fill it with useless eaters. Fire it off to great fanfare, then once it's floating out in space just have all the hatches open up and kill everyone inside as the dead husk floats off into the great dark beyond. It was never even built to complete the journey, just to get off the ground, with the immense budget pocketed by earth-magnates.

The idea that humans have some benevolent drive to explore doesn't really hold up to scrutiny imo. Europeans didn't make a serious attempt to sail West or round Africa for centuries, because all the trade that we needed flowed down the silk road and straight into our civilizational gullet. It wasn't until the silk road was cut off by Islamic expansion that we started the age of exploration in earnest. And the Portuguese discovered the necessary trade routes and developed them, then Spain stumbled upon the New World. From that point, it was international strife and competition that drove a race for resource extraction to fund contentions on the home continent - because the New World was just like the Old World and you could extract value from it super easily.

That's not true of any planet that we know of - it would be an immense drain on any nation to try to establish and maintain a colony on Mars or Venus which far exceeds the scale and scope of European colonies. It would be a ball and chain around that nation's leg as it contends with adversaries, and if the mother nation stumbled the colony would just wither and die. This applies even more to interstellar settlements, as you wouldn't really have any way to bring the resources back to earth or even communicate efficiently if you were using some sort of 'ark' method for early colonization.

 

[Black Spruce]

I'm willing to say that colonization of mars is more an attempt at the collective dick measuring of the human species rather than a genuine attempt to settle in a new frontier or save the species or whatever. There are a few celestial bodies in this solar system that could work for an off-planet colony, but everyone would basically have to live in the pod, eating the bugs, and drinking the soy because there's no feasible way to terraform the moon, mars, europa, or titan to create any vast open spaces hospitable to humans and animals.

The only option would be to attempt to find an Earth-like planet/moon or at least one that's close enough to be reasonably terraformed which is in another solar system. Interstellar travel is completely economically and logistically unfeasible even with light speed travel, and there would have to be some sort of development that allows faster-than-light travel or something, and I don't even think that's possible.

Humanity can try astroid mining or creating soypod colonies on the moon, mars, europa, or titan. But ultimately I think humanity has a hard time limit on it's existence tied to the sun. There'll be another ten billion or so years before it dies completely, but it will have long since wiped out all life on earth within another five hundred million or so years from solar brightening.

We're doomed, bys.

 

[Dylan]

Before we can colonize mars we need to take away voting right from women or else we'll have to deal with space troons.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I like the idea of colonizing the unhabitable places on Earth before Mars. What we call the country of Australia is really just a string of over-populated cities along the shore of the island. The central region is uninhabited due to intense temperatures, with only the most uniquely stubborn creatures fighting to survive. Before we head to space, I very much would like the uninhabited regions of Earth to be explored and conquered. The ocean, Antartica, etc. Why do spacenerds have such a big head about living on Mars when we can barely accomodate humans on our native planet?

If we are to live in space, I would sooner prefer O'Neill cylinders than planets. An O'Neill cylinder is a large space habitat with an Earth-like environment inside. It is shaped like cylinder which spins to generate gravity. An O'Neill cylinder would circumvent any need to terraform planets and are portable. The primary issue of course is that we need robots to build these in space and we have to find a source of material to build them as well. Mining asteroids is a higher priority than a Mars colony.

The danger of O'Neill cylinders is that they'll just become giant space pods. Because of economics, they'd either be for the super rich (Bezos wants to build one) or crammed floor to ceiling with tiny pod apartments. You would never see the wide-open interiors of an O'Neill cylinder like in those pictures, because they'd build as many decks as they could to maximize floor space. O'Neill lived in a better era where that sort of urbanism was considered bad, so he couldn't envision more than a million people living on one, but doing the math you could cram like 10 million people into a single O'Neill cylinder before heat/waste issues became a problem.

If I were the elite, I'd just keep Earth for myself and my WEF buddies and move all the people to space colonies. The atmosphere could have chemicals to produce low-level addiction (preventing them from ever returning to Earth/a non-pleb space colony) or even artificial microbes or nanoparticles that when breathed in, would flood the body and permit a sort of mind control via radio waves (this is all tech being worked on by DARPA, check the BRAIN Initiative). If there ever was a revolt, they'd just up the dosage of these nanoparticles or introduce toxic gases into the air system to weaken everyone so they could be surpressed.

This is true with all space colonies since the same could and would happen to a bunch of domes on Mars, but O'Neill cylinders seem like a distinct form of evil.

Before we can colonize mars we need to take away voting right from women or else we'll have to deal with space troons.

It's gonna be furries. People will genetically modify themselves to grow fur and animal ears and pay money (your tax money) to modify human embryos to do so as well so their kids will be furries too. Opposing this will be furphobic. Doctors will lose their licenses if they don't alter human embryos to become furries.

Troons are literally just an early and primitive form of transhuman abomination, but the shit to come will make No Dong Jones, the Tranch people, Yaniv, etc. look perfectly normal. "Freedom of morphology" is a huge concept among transhumanists. And yes, this relates to space colonization because we'll never meet actual aliens, we'll become the aliens. They will literally turn Mars/wherever into a giant 24/7 furry convention, and if you don't believe me, just go to Plebbit and ask the freaky transhumanists there what they want.

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

If we ever actually send any colonizing missions to the planets and moons of our solar system I sure don't envy the poor fucks that have to go research the oceans of Europa. Going down into that dark icy hellscape would probably drive me insane in an hour.

 

[Fools Idol]

What about Uranus?

Uranus was colonized years ago.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

Don't forget, the people who are saying "Mars is inhospitable and there's nothing there of any value for us, we should instead use that money to fund sex change operations in Pakistan" would've been saying the same thing about the Arctic 200 years ago, or about Australia 400 years ago, or about leaving the borders of their village 10,000 years ago.

Edit: Venus is an option too, but the environment is more hostile. It's not as much of a priority in the west because they're still butthurt that Soviets got a probe there first.

Also, the idea of humanity prioritizing outer space exploration before exploring our own solar system is beyond retarded. It's our fucking back yard, full of almost-free resources.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Don't forget, the people who are saying "Mars is inhospitable and there's nothing there of any value for us, we should instead use that money to fund sex change operations in Pakistan" would've been saying the same thing about the Arctic 200 years ago, or about Australia 400 years ago, or about leaving the borders of their village 10,000 years ago.

But from the perspective of a person centuries ago, they were absolutely right. That's why there was practically no one in the Arctic until they exhausted all the resources (including fur-bearing animals) from everywhere else. Same thing with Australia, it only took off because ships got better at traveling there so it became the white working man's paradise.

Centuries from now, there still won't be a reason to live on Mars. The population will stop growing within a century (and there's too many people as there is since the average Paki/African shits out 7-8 kids). Earth has millennia worth of fuel for nuclear reactors and receives 5.5×10^24 J from the Sun each year, so energy will never be an issue and we can just recycle and process ever less concentrated ores for all the resources we need. If we ever needed land (and we do, since the "eat the bugs" shit is because demand for beef has increased because the average Chinaman is getting richer so they deforest the Amazon for that and soy plantations to feed the cows), we could just build it right here on the oceans or put domes in Antarctica.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

I agree, space colonization is dumb. All we need is space defense for protection from asteroids that could hit earth. All the money on space exploration and colonization should be spent on mitigating climate change here on earth, our one habitable planet.

 

[Badungus Kabungus]

But from the perspective of a person centuries ago, they were absolutely right. That's why there was practically no one in the Arctic until they exhausted all the resources (including fur-bearing animals) from everywhere else. Same thing with Australia, it only took off because ships got better at traveling there so it became the white working man's paradise.

Centuries from now, there still won't be a reason to live on Mars. The population will stop growing within a century (and there's too many people as there is since the average Paki/African shits out 7-8 kids). Earth has millennia worth of fuel for nuclear reactors and receives 5.5×10^24 J from the Sun each year, so energy will never be an issue and we can just recycle and process ever less concentrated ores for all the resources we need. If we ever needed land (and we do, since the "eat the bugs" shit is because demand for beef has increased because the average Chinaman is getting richer so they deforest the Amazon for that and soy plantations to feed the cows), we could just build it right here on the oceans or put domes in Antarctica.

That's the thing, it's all about the resources. If humanity did not require increasingly huge number of resources, there would be no need to expand. It's not even about population numbers, it's about energy expenditure per person. One person nowadays uses up more energy than 10 people did a hundred years ago, and our energy requirements are growing. Even now, on average 10 Africans use a lot less energy than one European.

 

[The Grognard]

IMO it's perfectly fine to set up a research outpost or two there, if some on-site people are needed there. Anything more complex than that is likely to be not that valuable unless the planet's got some real fancy minerals to it.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

That's the thing, it's all about the resources. If humanity did not require increasingly huge number of resources, there would be no need to expand. It's not even about population numbers, it's about energy expenditure per person. One person nowadays uses up more energy than 10 people did a hundred years ago, and our energy requirements are growing. Even now, on average 10 Africans use a lot less energy than one European.

Energy requirements aren't growing as fast because we're becoming more energy efficient, although to be fair a lot of the decline is because older people don't use as many resources and neither do imported Africans/Muzzies.

But in any case, even if we required ten times as much energy and resources, the Earth could comfortably provide us with all of that for thousands of years, or potentially hundreds of millions if fusion is ever commercialized. It's a basic fact that more energy means it's possible to access more low-grade ores as well as improve the efficiency of recycling.

I think the only real challenge is meat production since expanding production means mass deforestation (total deforestation would come with its own costs since it could lead to droughts and desertification as it has in parts of Brazil) and greater risk of shit like bird flu outbreaks killing millions of poultry. It's really not surprising they want us to eat bugs and soy when that's such a bottleneck. But checking the math, if desalination were increased and new irrigation networks built, a lot of unproductive desert/scrubland could be turned into grazing land. Add on top of that building artificial islands which would let us comfortably raise all the animals needed.

Is the price tag enormous? Of course it is. But so is the price tag with space colonization, and every single technology I named besides fusion exists today.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

People have been to Mars long before the thought of it.

So when Elon Musk says he plans to take people to Mars, does he really mean building an empire on Devon Island?

 

[Irredemable Retardation]

Space colonization as of now is like brain uploading and the multiverse.
merely theoretically possible things whose credibility is overblown by grifters such as the muskrat and circlejerks of scientific popularizers, yet treated as facts by the futurist heckin love science niggers.

 

[WolfeTone]

It's building an oasis in a desert millions of miles away. The only reason anyone would do that would be to escape consequences.

 

[BlerdBjern]

Orbital habitats and a moonbase are the way to go. Much closer, and therefore far more feasible to send help if shit goes bad.

We need to get automated robots up to certain level, so we can use them to build a lot of basic infrastructure on mars, before people will have a shot in hell of living there for any significant amount of time.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

Orbital habitats and a moonbase are the way to go. Much closer, and therefore far more feasible to send help if shit goes bad.

We need to get automated robots up to certain level, so we can use them to build a lot of basic infrastructure on mars, before people will have a shot in hell of living there for any significant amount of time.

once we have an established moon base or moon bases, only then should we begin considering the martian question