It’s much easier and more effective to do science with people and labs in-situ than with slow, complex robots. The first people to land on mars will be scientists. We won’t be in a position to mess up the martian environment for generations. Stop spreading fear and propaganda. If finding life is what you’re after, Europa, Enceladus, Titan and Ganymede are much safer bets than Mars. Those worlds are completely inhospitable to humans, so there’s little to no chance that we mess them up. I’d much rather we start colonizing the moon, due to the relative ease of access, but due to its low gravity (and razor-sharp regolth particles) it isn’t a great place for humans.
I’d argue it’s actually immoral not to colonize mars. There will be no future humanity if we blow ourselves up here without a sustainable city elsewhere in the solar system.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We have a viable planet that can sustain life right now. And if we take care of it, it can sustain life for a much longer time.
Also Mars is inhospitable to humans as well
Agreed. But unless we spread out, we could be dooming ourselves. Imagine hundreds of thousands of years ago. If early humans had stayed in a single valley, never venturing further, simply because that place had everything we needed, a single natural catastrophe could’ve wiped us out. The same logic applies here.
We have the resources, capabilities and collective willpower to spread ourselves among the stars. We’ve never had that kind of power, we should take it while we still have the chance. We can do two things at once.
Simple solution; reduce childbirth. Let the people who don’t want to have kids not have kids and the ones that want kids have them. However, that would involve giving proper reproductive health rights. Childbirth is already in decline, which is why many world leaders are panicking, but just because a politician is panicking doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but I digress…
For some reason, we as humans believe that the only solution for overpopulation is to cut losses and run when we have enough knowledge on what to do to reduce the degradation of the planet. But to too many people, the solution is to go start overpopulatinh other planets. It’s just rinse and repeat. If we can’t even get our shit together here, then what cosmic right do we have to go do it to another planet?
Because we’re the most complex beings capable of the greatest changes to the environment anywhere in the universe, as far as we know. That’s worth keeping around, IMO.
We are also fucking up the planet we live on like a cancer. The planet would be better without us, and there is no reason to think we wouldn’t fuck up any other planet we went to. Just because we have abnormally large brains doesn’t make us anything special.
You cannot sterilize a human laboratory. Even our gut bacteria represent an unavoidable risk. Much better to build robots that we can stick entirely in an autoclave and sterilize, from surface to core, before sending to the Mars surface.
And there is a severe contamination risk. We know of bacteria that exist deep with the crust of Earth that, if you were to transport them to far beneath the Martian surface, would be able to live just fine. We know of extremophile bacteria that live in rocks on the surface of the most arid deserts of Earth that could likely survive just fine in a similar Martian environment.
You need to be thinking on the scale of millennia here. I think Mars should be explored by humans in Mars orbit, tele-operating humanoid robots on the Martian surface. Think Avatar except regular robots. Look at the state of how humanoid robots are developing right now, with remote presence via haptic suits or similar. Think of where that technology will be in a hundred or two hundred years. It’s very plausible that we will be able to operate such a machine in a way that feels indistinguishable from actually being there. And humans in Mars orbit would be able to operate them in real time.
I’m sorry, but your vanity is not worth the sacrifice of a world. Your pride is not worth us giving up what may be our one chance at finding a second Genesis in this star system. Realistically, it will take literally thousands of years of development of a human colony on Mars before it could credibly serve as a true backup to Earth, able to actually survive the destruction of Earth. Realistically, if you want a backup of Earth, you’re much better doing it in some mile-deep bunker on Earth, in a deep ocean settlement, or on the surface of the Moon. It will take a thousand years of development to turn Mars into a true backup of Earth. And I’m not even talking terraforming here, just the time to build up the population and truly independent supply chains. Waiting a few centuries to make sure we’re not ruining our one shot at this is not worth your pride. Yes, that means we in our time lose the glory of landing the first human on Mars. But that is a sacrifice we make for our children and our children’s children. We do not have a right to take that risk, just for our own vainglorious pride.
And yes, there may be other chances of life around Sol, but we have no idea of the habitability of those ice shell moons. We don’t know if life can even get going in such an environment, as we don’t really know how life got started on Earth. We do however know that life got started here, and we do know that early conditions on Mars were much more similar to the conditions on Earth’s surface than some ocean world buried under miles of ice. Mars is the only other terrestrial world in this star system that could plausibly have extant life near its surface. We should not sacrifice what may be our only chance to find it, for the sake of our vanity.
Leave. Mars. Alone.
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we don’t know if we’re going to be around in 200 years.
A leading theory on the genesis of life is that it first evolved around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Outer planets’ icy moons have prime conditions for such structures.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nature21377
Damn people have no room for nuance here. The Elon hate is eclipsing rational discussion here and your getting mad down votes. Sucks.
Mostly, I agree with you.
But, I do have a really really big fear that once Elon gets space x in a position to be NASAs only outsourced transportation contractor, they will have a monopoly on hardware and NASA will have a budget that got reduced to pennies of what it is now…
He’s gonna extort them to let him do whatever he wants or he’ll take his toys and go home. The first people on Mars will be scientists, but musks bullshit will be right behind them and he won’t have to listen to a fucking thing they tell him.
I hope that doesn’t happen but realistically there’s nothing we will be able to do to stop it if he wants to.
IMHO it’s his end goal. His reason for being trumps piggy bank right now. He’s positioning himself to be untouchable as a space transportation company in 15 to 25 years. Spacex will be the most valuable company ever if it happens. Asteroid mining is going to be a multi trillion dollar industry and he wants to be the company that develops the infrastructure and can get out there and actually become capable of actually doing it. But this last bit is just a hunch
I think you’re right. Bit if we want a spacefaring civilization, this is the path to get there. I really wish someone else was leading the charge, but this is the world we live in.
Sometimes it feels really lonely here on Lemmy, when it comes to space exploration. People are really negative about it, as if doing that takes away resources from making the world a better place. But it doesn’t! It’s a technological innovation program; the insights gained here can help improve life on Earth. And if we can move industry to space, Earth will be thankful.
Musk is not the path to space. I can’t believe anyone would have such a limited imagination. I would hope we could do better than some childish capitalist.