I’m not sure who said this but I read it long ago (I may not have the wording exactly right):
So “some time to come” is 43 years and counting.
We already know they can, but so what? To waste hundreds of billions of dollars on proving you can do something that’s not worth doing is a betrayal of your duty, as far as I’m concerned. We allow the government to take our money by force only so that they may use that money to make people’s lives better, not to waste it on some stupid hobby.
I have often wondered if any of the Apollo moon walkers will still be alive when the next human sets foot on the moon. A third of them are already dead, and the rest are in their eighties.
I’m sure there are little islands in the Pacific that we could all go to if we really wanted, and setting foot on them seem just as useful as setting foot on the moon again.
There is nothing there, there is no point to going there again, there is no point to wasting money sending humans there just because.
I totally get the argument that we can find progress by the very act going into space, but we have done the moon, do something else.
The thing is, doing something else in space becomes exponentially more difficult compared to the moon. The moon is relatively close, both in terms of distance and energetically. It’s still partway down our gravity well – to get to Mars or the Asteroids we have to climb farther out of the well and travel much further in distance. Space planners and SF writers seemed to take it pretty much for granted that we would use the Moon and orbiting space stations as “stepping stones” to further destinations. I believe it was Isaac Asimov who made the statement that we were fortunate to have a moon so close by to act as both a first destination and a later staging area for future spaceflight.
It makes sense – if you could use the raw materials obtained from the Moon to construct further spacecraft you wouldn’t have to drag it up, at great energy cost, out of Earth’s deep gravity well. If you could launch your missions from the Moon, you’d have an enormous benefit over trying to get that mass through not only the gravity but also the atmosphere and friction of Earth.
Then ther are the low G and vacuum industries that so many have written about.
Of course, most of that is of greatest significance is you intend to have people doing your work. But the stuff about materials, gravity, and dealing with atmospheric friction all still apply even if your goal is building and launching unmanned probes – it’s cheaper in terms of energy cost if you can build and launch them from the Moon instead of having to build them on the messy Earth in clean rooms, seal them up, and shjoot them through the dense soup of an atmosphere and the height of a gravity well into free space when you could build them out on the lunar surface (or with minimal shielding, construct it much more lightly (since it won’t have to stand up to Earth gravity, or be subjected to huge G-forces at launch), and send it out from the much shallower gravity well of the Moon.
I agree it makes sense as part of a substantially larger program. I wish there was the interest or will among politicians to do it, but I just don’t see it happening in my lifetime.
And SETI.
He killed SETI.
Don’t care.
You bastard!
Charming.
You asked. If you don’t like the answer, tough.
The article you linked was one of the most annoyingly written pieces I ever plowed through. You could almost hear the author slurping on Musk’s cock.
I don’t buy into the notion that humanity “must” leave this planet. In fact, I consider it little more than science-flavored woo. We cannot survive everywhere on this planet, let alone planets thst make the top of Mt. Everest, the Sahara Desert, and Antarctica look like carefree vacation spots by comparison. Species go extinct. Ours will too. Dont like that, tough.
Musk is doing it with his own money. I’m certain that he cares even less about your opinion than I do.
Not sure why you brought up Musk’s finances. Does spending his own money magically gjve Mars a breathable atmosphere or soil that isn’t toxic? Earth, after an asteroid strike, would still be more habitable than Mars.
Musk’s plan is to get the cost of going to Mars down to $500,000 per person
At that price, he feels that there are thousands of millionaires that would make the trip.
Then that money goes into reducing the cost of crewed spaceflight even further. Eventually, the average person will be able to afford to go.
Go where? Orbital flights are, perhaps, something that the wealthy may someday buy their way onto. Nothing in those painfully written articles gives me the impression that the author has any idea just how hostile the moon and Mars are. Musk probably does but glosses over it when he publicly speaks.
Putting one million people on Mars
From the article -
And in case you were wondering if this is going to be a vacation jaunt, Musk explains, “It’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies.” But he also points to the excitement and novelty of getting to found a new land—an experience that stopped being possible on Earth centuries ago: “There will be lots of interesting opportunities for anyone who wants to create anything new—from the first pizza joint to the first iron ore refinery to the first of everything. This is going to be a real exciting thing for people who want to be part of creating a civilization.”
Colonising Mars will not save people’s lives any time in the foreseeable future. If Mars ever becomes relevant as a lifeboat, it will be because we’ve invented some sort of future tech that makes the actual act of colonising it orders of magnitude easier.
Thinking that starting to colonise Mars now might save humanity is like being too impatient to wait five minutes for a bus and thinking you’ll get to your destination faster if you start walking.