If you are seriously saying that getting 20k people to Mars is impacting Earths climate less than getting them to Mars then you need a reality check.
Hint: You can't not just not walk there, but anything apart from sunlight to support life isn't there which even Antarctica has in abundance (oxygen and water).
no I'm saying their excess heat generated in a polar region will be more detrimental than the excess heat generated on Mars will be. Among other things.
Basically that the day to day living in the area being damaged is going to be more damaging than the one off transportation. That said I haven't done the calculation, but since I was the first one to even bring it up I doubt anyone has done it either.
This is not how climate works, not at all. The issue isn't “the amount of excess heat”, it's about how many shit-tons of greenhouse gases we would put in our atmosphere by sending those people to those two places.
And given you need to send more stuff on mars to make it livable than on Antarctica + the fact that you'd send them with freaking rockets instead of boats, it's going to be several orders of magnitude more damaging.
It impacts the pristine nature of Antarctica less. You’re also ignoring motivation. There are smart people motivated to see Mars. (Maybe not to settle. But to visit. The same way one may be curious to visit Antarctica without wanting to live there.)
CO2 emissions per a Falcon 9 : 425.
Emissions per human on a Falcon 9 (assuming 4) : 106
Emissions for a Starship launch: 2700
Emissions per human on a Starship launch (assuming 100) : 27
Emissions per year for America: 5,000,000,000
Emissions per year for a single American: 15
Emissions per for for a single American over an 80 year lifespan: 1200
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I don't know if people don't really appreciate how many people there are, overestimates rocket pollution, or just like some person reads something on the internet, somebody else repeats it, and nobody at any point bothers to see if what anybody is saying makes any sense. Rocket launches are such a nothing-burger in terms of emissions that yes sending people to Mars (assuming they stay for a while) would definitely be a net reduction in emissions.
For some fun tangential data, to match the current emissions of the US, alone, you'd need to launch about 12 million Falcon 9s. Last year was the biggest year, for space, by far with a whopping global total of 178 orbital launches. So the entire global pollution impact, for that record breaking year, was equivalent to ~5,000 Americans.
https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-pollution/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
I don't think there's any point in making life in Antarctica sustainable for now. But there's even less of a point in making life on Mars sustainable until we have made life on Earth sustainable first. Burning through resources on Earth to chase a pipedream of maybe having a self-sustaining colony on Mars a few hundred years from now is a luxury we can't afford at the moment -- and because we can't afford it it's doomed to fail even if we try.
Meanwhile NASA costs 0.15% of US GDP. I might want to bump that up to 0.3% or so, so that we can do Mars. Much more than that and I agree that we have other priorities (like climate change).
I mean I suppose you are familiar with these things, it's not like the history of this debate should be new and strange to readers of HN.
Oh, I'm sure that's absolutely true and not at all an exaggeration.
Whereas the 100x more costing and 100x logistically harder case for Mars is?
>Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what?
That we've invested the infrastructure to make living there more livable and more of a reality to have an actual community there, even if at baby steps.
If anything that would make the idea of setting up anything not like the moon-vists on Mars more viable - lots of much simpler problems would have to be solved in a place like Antarctica first because one can even pretend to be able to solve the 100x bigger issues on Mars.
>What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change?
Hugely detrimental, if not for anything else, for the false hope that climate change doesn't matter, we can always go to Mars if push comes to shove.
This is besides the fact that we've mandated by international law that Antarctica is forbidden from being "economically viable" because of the restriction on any economic activity. Plentiful (more than 20K) people live and work in the far northern arctic on the European and the North American continent with conditions roughly equivalent to those seen in the less extreme portions of Antarctica.
you argue that it isn't economically viable to do this, and this is the reason it hasn't been done.
Currently the people in Antarctica are there on research projects, increasing it to 20K people would imply what? Something other than research? What do you think will be required to make Antarctica housing of 20K people for 100 years economically viable.
Finally, what do you think will be the effect on climate change of at minimum quadrupling the people in Antarctica and providing them some sort of economically viable reason for being there?
What do you think the effect of putting an output on Mars will be on Climate Change? I'm thinking negligible in comparison. Aside from all the other arguments that we CAN put people in Antarctica the complexity and side effects for our environment are more dangerous than putting them on Mars.