Going to the moon in 2024

[Justin]

Never been a fan of the man personally, but that does not mean his argument against colonizing Mars is not sound.

His arguments are easily countered, also, Futurism is known as a clickbait site.

His reasoning is simple: Mars is entirely inhospitable to life as we know it.

Oh, I bet that's a newsflash to all of the people who've got an interest in Mars.

First of all, that means no one will want to live there. Humans generally like to live in places that aren’t quite so, well, deadly. “We’d rather stay where it is warm and comfortable,” he said.

Plenty of people go to all kinds of inhospitable places on Earth, from the Arctic circle to Mcmurdo. Many people will voluntarily endure living in awful places if it suits their interests, be they financial, scientific, or other.

This simple reasoning explains why we don’t find populated cities dotting the landscapes at Earth’s poles. Antarctica is both warmer and wetter than any place on Mars, and we don’t exactly see people lined up to live in the Arctic tundra.

There are no cities at the North Pole because it's just ice floating on water, which makes for a poor base to build permanent structures.
There are no cities at the South Pole because anything other than scientific research stations is banned by international treaty.

We won’t see cities flourishing on Mars for the same reason, Tyson says. Like the icy recesses of our own planet, Tyson says that some humans will venture to Mars for short visits, but they won’t remain for long. “Definitely, we’ll visit as a vacation spot. [But] I’m skeptical that you’ll find legions of people that will go there and want to stay,” he said.

Maybe, maybe not, but the biggest impediment to going to Mars, or The Moon isn't the inhospitable environment, but the lack of infrastructure that allows any sort of visitation at all. Being able to test his thesis becomes much easier when it costs $150/kg to lob something out of Earth's gravity well instead of $10,000/kg.

The Red Planet has a notoriously thin atmosphere and no global magnetic field. As a result, deadly cosmic rays and UV radiation shower the Martian surface, transforming the soil into a “toxic cocktail” of chemicals and causing temperatures to plunge to minus 62 degrees Celsius (minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit).

Theoretically a problem that's solvable via the construction of habitats that use the most abundant materials found on Mars to construct a habitat, namely the dirt.

To survive under these deadly conditions, humans would require “an entire infrastructure in which you live that mimics Earth,”

You don't say. Interestingly enough, there's currently an orbiting space station that has almost 20 years worth of constructing an infrastructure that mimics Earth, and in an environment more harsh than Mars or The Moon; it's called the International Space Station.

and that’s pretty much impossible to create on a global scale. Instead of setting our sights on generations of humans living on Mars, Tyson says we should hope for “just an Earth outpost” at best.

The one thing here that is actually reasonable, but only because it seems that NDT is arguing against colonizing Mars on the same level of Earth today, which is patently absurd. Even the most ardent Mars optimists don't see a Martian colony being larger than a million people within a century. I guess it's easy to be right if you bound your predictions to a ridiculous scale.

So, will anyone actually colonize Mars? Tyson isn’t optimistic. “My read of history tells me, no. Not because I don’t want it to be so. I’m just a realist about this.”

What read of history? Humans have been successfully colonizing new places since before the dawn of recorded history. This entire sentence sounds like bullshit.

To those at the helms of SpaceX, Mars One, and NASA, going to Mars probably doesn’t seem delusional. It just requires more preparation. But if colonizing Mars isn’t possible because of humans’ biology, well, maybe they will have to reassess after all.

All of the issues surrounding survival in other locations in the solar system are purely engineering problems, many of which have already been solved Earth side. The issue for getting offworld is going to be in properly architecting systems for existence off world and instantiating the systems and facilities that allow those designs to be rigorously tested and implemented under an acceptable risk profile.


Like I said, NDT should stick to tweeting about movies.

[davsel]

His arguments are easily countered, also, Futurism is known as a clickbait site.



Oh, I bet that's a newsflash to all of the people who've got an interest in Mars.



Plenty of people go to all kinds of inhospitable places on Earth, from the Arctic circle to Mcmurdo. Many people will voluntarily endure living in awful places if it suits their interests, be they financial, scientific, or other.



There are no cities at the North Pole because it's just ice floating on water, which makes for a poor base to build permanent structures.
There are no cities at the South Pole because anything other than scientific research stations is banned by international treaty.



Maybe, maybe not, but the biggest impediment to going to Mars, or The Moon isn't the inhospitable environment, but the lack of infrastructure that allows any sort of visitation at all. Being able to test his thesis becomes much easier when it costs $150/kg to lob something out of Earth's gravity well instead of $10,000/kg.



Theoretically a problem that's solvable via the construction of habitats that use the most abundant materials found on Mars to construct a habitat, namely the dirt.



You don't say. Interestingly enough, there's currently an orbiting space station that has almost 20 years worth of constructing an infrastructure that mimics Earth, and in an environment more harsh than Mars or The Moon; it's called the International Space Station.



The one thing here that is actually reasonable, but only because it seems that NDT is arguing against colonizing Mars on the same level of Earth today, which is patently absurd. Even the most ardent Mars optimists don't see a Martian colony being larger than a million people within a century. I guess it's easy to be right if you bound your predictions to a ridiculous scale.



What read of history? Humans have been successfully colonizing new places since before the dawn of recorded history. This entire sentence sounds like bullshit.



All of the issues surrounding survival in other locations in the solar system are purely engineering problems, many of which have already been solved Earth side. The issue for getting offworld is going to be in properly architecting systems for existence off world and instantiating the systems and facilities that allow those designs to be rigorously tested and implemented under an acceptable risk profile.


Like I said, NDT should stick to tweeting about movies.

Your counter arguments speak for themselves.