we wont "need" planetary colonization until 400,000 years from now.
and civilization as we know it is only 4,000 years old.
and we're going to exhaust all raw materials in 400 years.
if climate change doesnt cause a catastrophe in 40 years.
meanwhile, why not "colonize" the Sahara or the antarctic. it has atmosphere, survivable temperature, no UV rays, water source. colonizing mars 395,000 years too early is a wasteful error.
Colonizing inhospitable areas of the earth would require producing actual results and wouldn't have the built-in excuse of "space is hard, guys" when he inevitably fails. The man is the world's richest pretender, and for the life of me, I will never understand how he has been allowed to fail upwards so spectacularly.
I wouldn't go with 400.000 years old as some hard number. But yeah , I agree.
Elon Musk goes on saying things like "SpaceX will colonize Mars" , but that is a full-on lie. The likes of Space Programs are aiming using drones , then human landing to make on-spot data research and then , eventually , creating a scientific base.
All of that would need 100 year or so to make it in a responsible and sensible way.
That's like the best outcome. Most likely, it'll slowly progress until we find a financial benefit out there, at which point people will colonize Mars but only to operate the refineries under corporate control. Because you don't have a lawyer in space, but the company does have HR.
The hard deadline is about 500,000 yrs from now, when Sun has increased 10% in luminosity and is evaporating away our oceans, and we're going headlong into greenhouse effect. I chose 400k to give us some leeway (basically 10 whole "civilizations" before doomsday).
Probably the amount of time it would take to terraform Mars so we can actually take a walk outside there without a suit.
Which raises another question, if we can terraform, why not keep earth habitable?.... the whole Mars thing is utter and complete bs even on its surface.
Thing is, you can't "terraform" Mars. You can try to change characteristics but this will never solve the issue Mars has in the first place.
There is a reason Mars is not habitable, and can't hold enough gasses to form a proper atmosphere, and that's because it's not heavy enough to have a gravity high enough.
Not amount of terraforming (short of creating an artificial gravitational force) is going to solve this.
That, plus Mars will have the same existential threats in the form of asteroids and other objects hitting it even if we could make it habitable with sci-fi tech. So you would want to protect it with some deflector system or another, same question, why would we ever focus that to protect Mars and not our current home to start with? And Mars second if at all.
Now, if we could only invent something to protect us from our own suns biggest farts, if that ever hits directly we be cooked anyway. Any Mars colony even more so with that shitty bit of gas calling itself a atmosphere.
Our own sun can end us with a big fart in our direction.
It takes millions of years for an atmosphere to dissipate.
Creating one is a problem well beyond our civilisation, but having it disappear is not a concern.
Weirdly giving mars a magnetic field is totally within our current civilisation's scale.
A ~4000km long superconducting MgB transmission line at medium latitude exactly like the (much shorter) ones used in various places on earth because they are cheaper than trying to demolish some houses for an aluminium one would give it a magnetic field strong enough to hold an atmosphere.
So we have no means to get to the point where this is a problem.
Even if we did, it wouldn't be a problem until 10-100x as long as it took to make the atmosphere had elapsed.
We totally have the means to build a machine which would solve it right now, although moving said machine is way out of budget -- requiring thousands of Saturn Vs. A mars civilisation could easily do the same well before they had self sustaining industry.
dude, there will barely be any difference in 500k years, in 1 BILLION years the luminosity will be about 10% higher.
At that point it will probably be uninhabitable for most organisms on earth (especially humans, but there is no way "we" are alive then and if by some extreme miracle humans are, I would not consider them human anymore by a long shot)
Man as we know is about 60,000 years old, give or take a millinia. Civilization is about 10,000 years old, give or take several hundred years, depending on what civilization is (cities vs. communities)
The odds of man lasting an additional 400,000 years is a stretch. We'll be our own executioners.
I do agree, though, that as a species we should focus more on our own planet. Also, 'colonizing' the Sahara wouldn't be good for the entire planet's climate.
Global weather and how each other works together is fascinating stuff.
Excellent point. We're going to need all of that 'Mars tech' right here very soon to survive extreme heat/cold, floods, fires, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and also grow/raise food in a survivable biosphere. Stupid to go to Mars when Mars is coming to us...
colonizing mars 395,000 years too early is a wasteful error.
Nah, it's not. In life, you should never wait to do something until you need it. Being able to establish colonies in Mars is a noble goal. The fact that Musk is a fucking piece of shit and has been pretending to be a genius for years has nothing to do with it. Colonizing Mars is not bad just because Musk wants to do it, just like loving animals is not bad just because Hitler loved animals.
Does your car have anti-tiger protection? What about anti-elephant protection? You dont need them now (and wont ever need them) (and they cost $5 billion each) but I see that you would buy both of them immediately if you saw them on Amazon.
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u/GolfIll564 1d ago
I absolutely believe he thinks he’s the hero of the story