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A comment on NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine, a gas related to life. Parent comment

Re:NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine... by ruph123 on Monday March 29, 2021 @01:52AM (#26618098)
> But I think the point I was making stands. There are certainly innovations that sounds illogical but turn out to be very successful. Just because something sounds like a bad idea doesn't mean it is, it just means it hasn't worked yet.

No because your point was about horses being replaced by cars, which is what people (and probably horses) were skeptical about at that time. In the same way IBM was saying that computers will never appear in homes, etc.

But these devices were already there. The misconceptions were about predicting demand and miniaturization. This is completely different from terraforming. You are comparing "oh these devices sure never will be popular enough to make this other thing obsolete" with "lets nuke the Mars to create an atmosphere so we can live on it" (always winter, yeay).[0]

Your argument is bad because by saying "technologies were laughed at in the past" every technology that sounds laughable should be taken seriously? No. This is the same trap that Theranos investors had fallen in. It is all a fantasy.

We humans are very bad at estimating what is possible and what not. E.g. our inability to divert asteroids [1]. That is already a hard problem and currently not possible to do.

I am not against crazy technological ideas, for example the space elevator had a surprisingly good feasibility to being realized before we polluted our planet's atmosphere with junk. Terraforming Mars is in the Theranos land of crazy ideas though.

> Just like I also didn't think landing a rocket on its tail ever sounded unfeasible.

Maybe because that was already demonstrated in the 90s [1].

[0]: https://www.space.com/elon-musk-nuke-mars-terraforming.html [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o

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Re:NASA mission to Venus in 1978 may have detected phosphine... by darkerside on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:15AM (#26620445)
Not sure how you got off track, but my point was that building cloud cities on Venus seems no more unrealistic than terraforming Mars. Both are really fucking hard, but Mars probably sounds easier to the poster I was replying to because it is more similar to what we've seen in the past.
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