They seem to honestly believe that Musk will get human beings to Mars before the end of Trump’s next term (under the assumption he has one).
I’m sorry. This won’t happen in Trump’s next term (assuming he has one). This won’t happen in my lifetime. This won’t happen in the lifetime of anybody currently over the age of 20.
MAYBE someone who was born today will see human beings land on Mars.
MAYBE the grandchildren of someone born today will see human beings build something semi-permanent on Mars.
It’s a stupid idea, and a massive waste of resources that could be used here. There are multiple articles from real scientific sites, and YouTube videos from real scientists why it’s a stupid idea.
It’s technically feasible in the bare minimum “Got there” sense. Bringing someone and getting them back. But we learned a lot by the moon exploration, and that is that we aren’t ready for colonization. Living there, for a long time, let alone indefinitely, that is where the million details are still unresolved. I think that’s the problem that is worth tackling. We already know we can live in space for a long time as long as there are continuous shipments of resources from Earth. We could just flood the logistics problem with money and get to mars next year if we wanted to. Other than the psychologically horrifyingly long distances involved, of course.
The technical hurdles are insurmountable with any technology we have today. It is impossible, period, for humans to be landed on Mars in four years. It is impossible, period, for humans to have a semi-permanent settlement on Mars in the lifetime of anybody alive.
Going to the Moon, our closest neighbour, is child’s play in comparison to going to Mars. And look how well getting humans back to the moon is going…
Well I pointed to one already: the numbskulls in charge of space programs can’t even return us to our closest neighbour (about 400,000km) so thinking they can get us to Mars in the foreseeable future (an average of 225,000,000km, so about 550× the distance) is ludicrous.
At the rate things are going we won’t be standing on the Moon again by the end of a purported Trump term, not to mention Mars, just based on distance alone.
But this isn’t even what I’m actually talking about. I’m talking about how badly people underestimate the difficulties of a trip to Mars. Here are some (and only some!) of the issues:
We have never sustained human beings in a closed environment for the length of time a trip to Mars would take (nine months or so). This is the absolute basic first step. To send people to Mars they have to reach Mars alive, and … despite many experiments and tests we don’t know how to do this. We’re trying to climb K2 and we haven’t even taken the first step out of our beds yet. This isn’t something we’re going to suddenly solve. Can we solve it? Sure. Almost certainly. But not in four years. Probably not in forty years.
Mars is the “Killer Planet” when it comes to our technology. More probes have been lost to Mars than to any other planet by number, and only Venus beats it for proportion. (I’m now laughing as I picture people downvoting me because I’m suggesting that colonizing Venus is even dumber than colonizing Mars!) The problem of landing on Mars is hard for machinery that’s a whole lot tougher than a human body is. It will take way more than four years (and likely forty) to figure out how to safely get people down to the planet once their space coffins arrive.
Why space coffins? Radiation is a killer! The Apollo astronauts received about the equivalent of two head CT scans of radiation in their ~6-day round trip. Extrapolating that to a 540-day round trip and you’ve got the equivalent of about 180 head CT scans. This is bad with a capital B. (Don’t believe me? Go to your local hospital and stick your head in the CT machine and trigger it 180 times. Come back and report on the results.) “But,” I can hear you say, “most of the radiation the Apollo astronauts received came from the Van Allen belts.” This is true. And that’s because the Apollo missions were sent out in periods of solar activity minima. (And even with that planning they had a scare in one of the missions!) There are no 18-month periods of solar minima. For 540 days our astronauts will be bathing in solar wind, flares, CMEs, cosmic rays, and a whole lot more sources of ionizing radiation. But hey, at least we might get someone cool like Reed Richards or Susan Storm out the other end, right?
OK, so we’ve solved keeping people in a closed habitat, we’ve solved the landing thing within sane risk levels, and we have invented magic anti-radiation technology. Have we invented a substitute for food? No? Well then, provisioning is going to be a huge problem. Here on Earth we eat 1.5-2kg of food per day. So let’s assume that for this trip we’ve turned that food into the densest (and most monotonous) form possible and make it 0.5kg instead. That’s 270kg of food per person at an absolute minimum with no margin for accident or error. Realistically that’s closer to a ton per person if we don’t want a single accident to turn our spaceship into a fancy space coffin. Now add water to that. That’s 3l per day, or another 1.5 tons per person for the trip as a razor’s edge minimum. OK, I’ll be nice and pretend we invent some fancy waste reclamation system that’s 90% efficient, and I’ll ignore that we get a lot of our water from our food and we really need to account for the bone-dry rations here. That’s still 150kg per person without a safety margin and more likely about half a ton per person. Add oxygen to that (and again I’ll stick to a fiction that says we can realistically use a pure-oxygen environment) and that’s about a kilogram per day, so half a ton per person, or, with safety margins about 1.5 tons. And so on and so on and so on. We lack the ability to launch that much into orbit, complete with the spacecraft systems around it, plus the squishy fleshy things that need it, in four years. We just don’t have enough rockets. And this is for the simplest mission profile.
And as for colonizing it once we overcome those difficulties (not likely within your lifetime, remember!): https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will-ever-colonize-mars Living on Mars is just a non-starter from the get-go. It’s far harsher than the harshest environment we have ready access to here on Earth (Antarctica) and we barely even have a foothold on Antarctica which is literally a million times easier to get to and provision.
There’s also one more reason to be certain that getting to Mars is not going to happen anytime soon and that colonizing Mars is a pipe dream that will literally never happen: going back to the topic of this board, the Apartheid Manchild is soundly convinced it’s just around the corner. Like his Hyperloop. And his full self-driving. And his solar panel factories. And his … you get the picture. The fact that this twat, of all people, is the biggest cheerleader of visiting and colonizing Mars should tell you just how implausible the idea really is.
P.S. Keep downvoting the truth away, children. It won’t change the fact that if you’re alive now you will almost definitely not see any kind of semi-permanent human presence on Mars and you likely won’t even see a human landing on Mars. “Click-click-clickety-click” doesn’t change harsh reality. You can’t vote reality away!)
Promise ridiculous prosperity will happen when they win.
Lose.
No matter how successful the winner might eventually be, they can always point to the ridiculous prosperity that never happened, letting them rob their base of even enjoying the basic joy of any progress, keeping them mad, hateful, and controlled.
That actually happened in Hungary with Fidesz, in 2006. They even organized the riots that happened in the autumn.
Of course the MSZP-SZDSZ government had a lot of issues, like planning to privatize the health care, but was sabotaged by Fidesz, a lot. Fidesz even helped the far-right as long as they didn’t deny the Holocaust too much (which is still technically a felony in Hungary, except no longer prosecuted to my knowledge), and pushed the “free speech for all, except for those damn gays and Romani” alignment, while also helping to suppress any news about the anti-communism paranoia of SZDSZ. There was a now infamous political ad of theirs that was pushed during the call for the health-care privatization debates which framed state-owned health care as the last remaining element of communism, except almost no one saw them as most outlets tried to frame the moderate-libertarian party as “communist”, especially the then up and coming kuruc info, a far-right “news” website known for doxxing and holocaust denial. Funnily enough, Fidesz is quietly supporting health-care privatization.
They might not even make it there. The radiation doses that they would take on the journey are massive and likely to do heavy damage like cataracts and organ failure, especially if solar storms were to hit while they were outside the magnetosphere of either planet.
They seem to honestly believe that Musk will get human beings to Mars before the end of Trump’s next term (under the assumption he has one).
I’m sorry. This won’t happen in Trump’s next term (assuming he has one). This won’t happen in my lifetime. This won’t happen in the lifetime of anybody currently over the age of 20.
MAYBE someone who was born today will see human beings land on Mars.
MAYBE the grandchildren of someone born today will see human beings build something semi-permanent on Mars.
I mean the technical hurdles aren’t insurmountable. But we lack the political will power to put resources needed into it.
It would take 60s moon landing level of commitment for 10-15 years to do any sooner.
It’s a stupid idea, and a massive waste of resources that could be used here. There are multiple articles from real scientific sites, and YouTube videos from real scientists why it’s a stupid idea.
I wasn’t commenting on whether we “should” go, only that I felt we had the resources/ability to go…
It’s technically feasible in the bare minimum “Got there” sense. Bringing someone and getting them back. But we learned a lot by the moon exploration, and that is that we aren’t ready for colonization. Living there, for a long time, let alone indefinitely, that is where the million details are still unresolved. I think that’s the problem that is worth tackling. We already know we can live in space for a long time as long as there are continuous shipments of resources from Earth. We could just flood the logistics problem with money and get to mars next year if we wanted to. Other than the psychologically horrifyingly long distances involved, of course.
I’ll say that Andy Weir got most of it right on how to do manned missions to Mars.
You build a huge space station, and then use that as the ship that goes to and from Mars.
Then the actual mission on the surface lasting a month or three before the astronauts pack up and head home.
The technical hurdles are insurmountable with any technology we have today. It is impossible, period, for humans to be landed on Mars in four years. It is impossible, period, for humans to have a semi-permanent settlement on Mars in the lifetime of anybody alive.
Going to the Moon, our closest neighbour, is child’s play in comparison to going to Mars. And look how well getting humans back to the moon is going…
Can you expand on why you are reaching that conclusion?
Well I pointed to one already: the numbskulls in charge of space programs can’t even return us to our closest neighbour (about 400,000km) so thinking they can get us to Mars in the foreseeable future (an average of 225,000,000km, so about 550× the distance) is ludicrous.
At the rate things are going we won’t be standing on the Moon again by the end of a purported Trump term, not to mention Mars, just based on distance alone.
But this isn’t even what I’m actually talking about. I’m talking about how badly people underestimate the difficulties of a trip to Mars. Here are some (and only some!) of the issues:
There’s also one more reason to be certain that getting to Mars is not going to happen anytime soon and that colonizing Mars is a pipe dream that will literally never happen: going back to the topic of this board, the Apartheid Manchild is soundly convinced it’s just around the corner. Like his Hyperloop. And his full self-driving. And his solar panel factories. And his … you get the picture. The fact that this twat, of all people, is the biggest cheerleader of visiting and colonizing Mars should tell you just how implausible the idea really is.
P.S. Keep downvoting the truth away, children. It won’t change the fact that if you’re alive now you will almost definitely not see any kind of semi-permanent human presence on Mars and you likely won’t even see a human landing on Mars. “Click-click-clickety-click” doesn’t change harsh reality. You can’t vote reality away!)
How close would 44bn get us to Mars? I can’t help think that would have been a better investment than twitter.
Hear me out: They’re planning to lose.
Promise ridiculous prosperity will happen when they win.
Lose.
No matter how successful the winner might eventually be, they can always point to the ridiculous prosperity that never happened, letting them rob their base of even enjoying the basic joy of any progress, keeping them mad, hateful, and controlled.
That actually happened in Hungary with Fidesz, in 2006. They even organized the riots that happened in the autumn.
Of course the MSZP-SZDSZ government had a lot of issues, like planning to privatize the health care, but was sabotaged by Fidesz, a lot. Fidesz even helped the far-right as long as they didn’t deny the Holocaust too much (which is still technically a felony in Hungary, except no longer prosecuted to my knowledge), and pushed the “free speech for all, except for those damn gays and Romani” alignment, while also helping to suppress any news about the anti-communism paranoia of SZDSZ. There was a now infamous political ad of theirs that was pushed during the call for the health-care privatization debates which framed state-owned health care as the last remaining element of communism, except almost no one saw them as most outlets tried to frame the moderate-libertarian party as “communist”, especially the then up and coming kuruc info, a far-right “news” website known for doxxing and holocaust denial. Funnily enough, Fidesz is quietly supporting health-care privatization.
You are mistakenly assuming the human being travelling to Mars will still be living.
I don’t think they’re legally considered human beings once dead. 🤣
Titan II: Spacemersible
Well getting humans onto Mars he could do.
But getting them back…
Nope. He won’t even be able to get humans onto Mars. Not in four years. Not in 20 years.
I mean if you count bodies as humans you can just do a Mars rover style drop.
But I was of course not talking seriously because obviously there is 0 chance humans get to mars in the next decade.
Probably not even within the next five decades. Possibly not even within the next ten.
They might not even make it there. The radiation doses that they would take on the journey are massive and likely to do heavy damage like cataracts and organ failure, especially if solar storms were to hit while they were outside the magnetosphere of either planet.
Where did I ever say he would get them there alive?
Let’s fire coffins into the sky!
Your parents lied to you. You’re not funny.
Oh I did not notice sorry.