I put it to you that a Mars colony, to be justifiable, must be justifiable on objective grounds. There are lot's of goofy ideas. Hence the popsicle skyscraper. "Because we want to", "because it's there" justify all goofy ideas equally.
If you are outside, there will be a brief, desperate struggle to apply a patch to the tear, if it is small enough and you can reach it (unlikely), and you haven't fallen down a hole and lying stunned or unconscious.
Consequently few, if any, excursions would occur outside of the pressurised habitat on Mars.
Reductio ad absurdum? C'mon, you're better than that. Anything can be made to look goofy if taken to extremes. Put a little more effort in your arguments, please.
Honestly speaking: These proposals for a Mars colony *are* goofy. They *are* extreme.
Given that you yourself are making similarly baseless assertions based on confirmation biases, I find the solidity of your arguments to be in question.
Rather than address my assertions, you attempt a burden of proof fallacy. If you think my assertion: The gravity on Mars is such that a stay there of any duration (say, 12 earth months) will mean returning to earth will kill you. There won't be any return trips. is incorrect, then say so. Don't wave your hands over it.
Rather than handwave about how long haul mining and aluminum smelting somehow instantly kills people doing it, (a proposition that would mean that the aluminium cans used to ship soda are made in a process that systemically ends human lives, which is an absurdity in itself- There are industrial accidents and risks of exposure, yes-- but more people die in car crashes and from inhaling carbon monoxide from faulty domestic heaters than die in smelter related incidents-- which is a statement that can be supported on demand with actual statistics, collected by real social scientists.)
Learn to read.
So please, if you are holding out on some actually substantive basis for your condemnation, by all means, share it with the rest of the class.
By which you mean, the one person. By my reckoning, there are 200000 people with enough belief in a mars colony to put money on it. That is a vanishingly small group. You won't get there without convincing the other 8 000 000 000 of us that such an idea has merit. So convince us.
You know. I tried to write a calm, and sensible reply to this poisoned barb you have thrown at me, and I just couldn't do it.
The fact that you engage with this discussion emotionally and respond with a long, rambling and self-contradictory screed should signal to you that your view of mars colonisation is based on emotion rather than reason. I have no reason to respect the subjective demands of your emotions above the objective concerns that arise from reason. It's up to you to make a convincing argument. If you are not prepared for the rigours associated with other people questioning your beliefs, then you should not publically express them until you ARE ready to debate calmly.
1) You make the mistake in asserting that people leaving earth as political asylum seekers would be doing so without something already being there. Even the puritans didnt leave england en-mass until AFTER the colonies in north america were fully settled and productive. --What you are are failing to grasp, is that there would not be such a place to go, if nobody makes the damned colony; The puritans would never have left england, because the colonists never would have preceded them. Did all the irish people fleeing ireland after the potato fammine come with metric fucktons of food and other things? No-- they sold themselves into indentured servitude to come here, with just the clothes on their backs. Why? because there was a means of producing food over here already.
I put it to you that YOU are making that mistake. There is nothing on Mars. Therefore, by your own admittance, Mars is unsuitable for colonisation. By your own admittance, we've never successfully implemented the strategy you advocate, even on earth, with it's comparative wealth of resources and freedom of movement. Why should I believe that such a plan could be successful on Mars?
There is nothing inconsistent with wishing to create a colony, with the intention of permitting political asylum once it is able to accept such persons.
It follows then, that we could also create such a colony on earth.
As bad as things are for us in the west at the moment, things are far worse for others.Therefore when considering the need to establish a refuge for those seeking political asylum our minds turn to those who currently seek political asylum with us and under our (certainly flawed) democratic system. How do these people seek asylum on Mars? How do the Karen, the Tamil, the Hazara, the Uighur people get passage to Mars?
If you understand the means to create a fair and just society then by all means express those principles. I think you don't. I think you want to merely repeat the mistakes of the past, where people fled oppression with a view to creating a fair and just society, and inevitably ended in oppression once more.
Maybe you could use this as an ad for a future mars colony: "Mars: Live Painfully for a minute and a half!"
, technology inevitably comes out of space exploration that's valuable elsewhere.
The same could be said of a popsicle skyscraper. Such an undertaking would inevitably result in technological advances.
Elon Musk has suggested the cost of a round-trip passage to Mars is likely going to cost about $500k.
The gravity on Mars is such that a stay there of any duration (say, 12 earth months) will mean returning to earth will kill you. There won't be any return trips.
That may seem like a whole lot, but it is comparable in price for somebody from a modern 1st world country to what people were paying in the 18th Century for passage to European colonies in terms of needing to literally sell everything they had including their house, save up for years, and then put all of that money on the line for a trip to the colonies.
We now realise that 18th century colonists were actually moving to lands which were already occupied. They were tourists and immigrants - no equivalence with settling another planet.
As for the "tons of supplies needed to keep you alive there", only the first few colonists are going to need that mountain of supplies. Even then, such colonies will simply fail unless they are able to use local resources to produce literally everything they are going to need for survival.
Then the "colony" will fail. Have you seen a long wall miner? An aluminium smelter?
As for money on Mars, I'm sure the people who will live on Mars will figure out a currency among themselves for the allocation of scarce resources. Your presumption that there will be no means to "make money" simply shows a lack of understanding of economics.
That's what I said. There is n o way to make anything on mars, and nothign will grow - implies that the economy wil be entirely based on the things that are brought from Earth. Mars = communism.
I don't even know how to respond to the rest of your essay here.
Ideally, you wouldn't respond with baseless assertions.
Mars has more area to roam upon than the land area of the Earth.
Stop being absurd. Mars is bathed in deadly radiation. People won't habitually go outside, unless there is an emergency. Life on mars is lived inside. Imagine living six to a shipping container. That's Mars.
This is not quite correct, because robots don't have brains, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.
Non sequitur. If we don't need the rest of the human body on mars, it's implied that we don't need the human brain either.
Anyway, the point is, yes, robots could (and will) be a very significant part of colonization effort, but they can't replace humans entirely.
The unconvincing part is the explaining why we should be expending the effort at all. In short, a mars colony is like a monorail, a popsicle skyscraper, and escalator to nowhere. If you actually articulate a reason for going to mars, it turns out this is either something that can be done more easily by a robot, or by an earth bound solution.
I guess my position is, you have to start somewhere,
My position is that this is like saying that an ice block is the first step toward building a popsicle skyscraper. If end goal is unjustified, then so are the intermediate steps.
That man
Which man?
That man controls the climate which is like saying we control the climate of our galaxy as we orbit around it through various galactic conditions.
Is earth approximately the same volume as the galaxy?
My statement was that we will tailor ourselves through a mixture of technology and biology.
If we were actually committed to the technology, we would never have to go ourselves. Sending human bodies implies a zealous commitment to a low tech solution frozen in time, like steam power in the age of electric cars. If we had the technology to make Mars comfortable we would have no need to do so, since martian robots will outstrip the utility of the human body by a country light year. And biologically we can never survive on Mars. Apart from the cold, there is no atmosphere, so exposure to the outside will cause ruptures in the cell walls, with consequent death directly after. You body is a bag of water made of billions of bags of water: they will burst on contact with the vacuum of Mars.
political freedom for starters.
I stand astounded. Whatever makes you think that living on Mars will bring political freedom? How are those ideas even connected?
Everything about Mars suggests that political freedom is virtually impossible. You will not be able to pay the cost of your transfer to Mars (including the tons of food and supplies needed to keep you alive there). This means that to convince someone to pay for your trip to Mars, they will require something from you in return. The basis of life on Mars is obligation - your obligation to the government or company that paid for you to travel there.
In addition there is the issue that nobody on Mars will have any money or any means to make money. There is no resources , no soil to grow crops, no infrastructure to support primary industry or manufacturing. At best people might trade the various things they brought from earth. And themselves (i.e. prostitution), although the notion of sex will be less attractive after the radiation sickness kicks in.
Mars will be like prison, without any chance of escape. Linking life on Mars with political freedom is simply laughable.
Or has the situation with the orwelian police state in much of the western world, coupled with the growing corporatocracy in the eastern world, and the overall growing issues with pollution and and criminality in the rest of the world.
It might not have occurred to you that you caused that orwellian state. Who is to blame for the state of Western democracy but ourselves? In which, you will just take that corruption with you to Mars. Unless you view yourself and coincidentally your fellow travellers as somehow more enlightened than the rest of us - do you think that?
If Machiavelli were a hacker, he'd have worked for the CSSG. -- Phil Lapsley
