Re:Everything About Mars Is the Worst (2017)
by BiteCode_dev on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:51AM
(#40632563)
People didn't know there was a fertile land of the other side. Just like we don't know if there is a good thing that will come out of mars. We just know the constraints.
It's not about what you know is there. It's the potential.
There is no point for Usain Bolt to run that fast. There is not point in building the tallest tower in the world once again.
Meanwhile, the mars goal already managed to bring us spaceships that land and divide the cost of putting satellites in orbit by 10.
No other path lead to it because there was nothing to motivate it enough.
Sometimes being outside easy nuclear strike capabilities of the superpowers is a good on its own. Plus lot less annoying environmentalists and I imagine plentiful fissile material.
Re:Everything About Mars Is the Worst (2017)
by jiggawatts on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:09AM
(#40632269)
If literally every nuclear bomb ever made was detonated in a world war, the fallout from that would be a significantly smaller problem than the steady-state radiation is on Mars right now.
The fallout will eventually decay, but Mars will stay an irradiated hellscape forever.
With a couple fairly simple genetic modifications humans could thrive in place with high background radiation, in a place where nobody can throw nukes at you for doing simple genetic modifications.
Re:Everything About Mars Is the Worst (2017)
by jiggawatts on Monday June 10, 2024 @05:01PM
(#40639040)
If rockets with people can get to Mars, then rockets with nuclear warheads can get to Mars.
Because there was fertile land on the other side.
Moving to Mars is the opposite: it is crossing the desert to go move into a frozen hellscape of radioactive desert.
> I'm sure leaving a fertile land 100 000 years ago, crossing the desert on foot
Actually, this kind of thing basically never happened, for some values of never.
Humans didn't leave Africa by crossing the Sahara desert. When we left Africa, the Sahara wasn't a desert.
Similarly, Aboriginal Australians didn't swim or canoe to the mainland, they walked there at a time when sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge to PNG.
Until very recently, nobody did crazy long crossings over uninhabitable lands or waters. Expansion happened incrementally, over habitable areas to other habitable areas.
> But eventually something pays of big time.
There is no reason to think that there is anything of value on Mars. No oil, no arable land, no liquid water, no unique unobtanium like in the movies. Just the same eighty or so elements, in roughly the same distribution. Just colder, drier, and impossibly far from everything you care about.