Vacation home on Mars? Forget about it!
 

https://gizmodo.com/humans-will-neve...ars-1836316222

Radiation poisoning, brutal cold temps, deadly perchlorate soil, thin atmosphere that is chiefly comprised of CO2... it'll take technologies that only exist in science fiction. :wah:

Then, you mean I shouldn't reply to that email I got offering me a timeshare on Mars?...












<O>

I think since longer time now that wanting to live on Mars is just the daydreaming of some unreflecting romanticists indeed. Even if technology would enable the human body to survive the many challenges - whats the point in physically surviving if there is nothing to feed the needs of your soul? The stamina to survive even extremiest, harsh living conditions and threatful environments and deadly circumstances and situations, may they be man-made or nature-made, comes from the inner side of a man, while his intellect and ratio can get him only so and so far, and not further. And personally I think we humans simply are not made and our soul has not what it takes to confront and live in the eye of that empty abyss that deep space is. As a youngster, I found it fascinating, and I still like Science Ficton. But as the adult I now am, I admit that the perspective of being all around surrounded by just nothing and then nothing in reach, just scares the hell out of me. Floating in space around Earth might be a spiritual, transforming experience for some, maybe it would even be for me - but floating in the middle of a Nowhere bigger than human mind can ever hope to understand, or standing on a dead rock somewhere and being forever outside reach of the home I knew and left behind - this perspective holds absolutely no excitement or attraction for me anymore. None.

Man is a master of deceiving himself. We talk a lot about sustajnable economy, and living with reduced CO2 footprint, and we start eat vegan and we do not dare to fart anymore, and so forth. We think this helps to battle down climate warming and will allow us to survive on this planet. But it is just pointless strawman arguments we want to believe so that we must not realise how deep in the mess we are and how radically we would need to make things totally, completely different if we meant it serious about sustainable resouce management and protecting the environment and defending the basis of our biological existence. And i think that the scenarios they form to send man, by whatever kind of mission and technology, via spaceships to other planets, is the same kind of self-deceiving illusion. Its an escape attempt from reality. At best we learn to start ressource mining on Moon, that scenario might hold some realistic perspective. But Mars as an alternative Earth for Earth One dying? Nobody talks of colonizing the deep sea on earth just because we occasionally manage to send a robot down there, or even a manned specialised submarine that can stand the high pressure. Ask the divers whether they want to spend the rest of their lives in an environment like that boat - and then on another planet out of reach of Earth. Or in the middle of the abyss.

So far we only test-tried swimming very close to the rim of the bassin, one hand holding contact to the rim, a safety line around the chest, and guardians walking beside us with long bars we could grab. Crossing an open ocean by swimming and diving down to its bottom - it just does not compare, even less so, since the ocean is finite. Space is (practically) not.

We deceive ourselves there.

I do not want this to be understood as a talk against technology or against continuing space programs. i just want to see them focussing on realistic goals: Orbit, Moon, robot-led exploration beyond that. Maybe even sending humanoid experimental rabbits to mars for some time. But "coloniztion" on a scale justifying using that big word? Dont make me laugh.

Lets be realistic, even dream a bit. Dreams may motivate us daring a certain next small step that without a vision leaving the context of what we know we would not dare to take. But be realistic. Spac eis not waiting for humans. Nor for life. Almost everything in the cosmos is dead, and uninterested. Life beyond Earth so far is just an idea, is just a theory, totally unproven. We collect hints and traces that we interpret, but evidence for life outside Earth we still have NONE. Cosmos takes no note of us being here, it does not care, and nothing we do makes a difference.

Comfort and solace lies in the beauty that life holds for us here on our good old and beautiful planet earth. Its here were our hearts rest and find peace, and confidence. And it is this place that the kit of our senses and physical traits and abilities was made for and tailored for and adapted to. Not "there" - but "here".

We better start meaning serious business with our messes here at home before throwing our life's time away at escapistic evasion manouvers of our imagination. We could as well take LSD.

When you consider travel times between Earth and Mars, only way you could have vacations there and still have time to work, would be to work on those ships running back and forth between those planets.

Agreed. Humans have to admit that deep space exploration by humans is not possible. It is a harsh reality but likely true. We did not evolve for that possibility. Getting humans to Mars will be expensive and could end in a tradgedy. Rescue will be impossible.

The most likely way to explore our galaxy will be by artificial intelligence combined with robotics. The human being in its present state of evolution is just not adaptable to the space environment.

Scam comes to mind.

We will never land man on Mars.

I could imagine that man maybe finds a way to migrate his human (his own, not some AI surrogate) self-awareness and conscience and mind into machinery made of more robust kinds than our fragile, biological body. Suchg a mind in the machine then maybe can bridge distances and surive over timeframes that are beyond what we can imagine with our contemporary evolution status of technology. Maybe the form of the biologicaiol human is just a cradle for the evolving of something different.

But then i fear that we one day find that we are indeed the only ones. That life and mind maybe is kind of an anomaly in a dead, mindless universe. A curious exception from the rule that can only be found on one planet, that owes its existence only to the probability saying that it shoukd exist in a universe this big and offerign this many chances for something happening.

Hm, I sometimes got told/got accused that I take short cuts when refusing "religion" and being lazy when refusing to take the "effort to believe". But the truth is its exactly the other way around. Accepting to maybe exist just for no special reason and accepting that we are alone, mwithout tkaing comfort from a storxy about a higher being caring for oneself - I find that much more heavier a burden to bear. But then I may watch something in nature, do a walk in the woods, see the sky and the clouds moving on it, the colours, and the greass in the wind - and all these thoughts go away, and something inside the heart is falling silent, is content, and all questions are no more. Space programs...? They are funny stuff to do, aren't they...!? :)


P.S.
From one of my favourite novels, Solaris by Stanislav Lem:
“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.”

Agreed :yep:

That reminds me of this quote by the late Charles Krauthammer ...

As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy – a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

We will put a human on Mars

And it will be on the same day-100 years after the human toke the first step on the moon.

Thereafter it will be shuttle traffic between Earth and Mars.

Markus

Yea right the stuff of Sci FI. :har::har:

I have to add here, I remember there was a documentary about Elon Musk sending people to Mars. The
People going through the process had a small clip about why they want to go, and how happy they would be if selected.

Looking back, most were millennials, they had coffee mug size holes in their ears, in transition between genders, I remember one being “black lives matter!”

Most of their reasoning for going was because “this world wasn’t fair” or “we need to start a better world!”

After listening to the Mars atmospheric realities, I laugh at the idea most of the people in the video aren’t even tough enough to handle inequality, much less a world that would kill them.

No sir, I'm still trying to get my deposit back :)

My take is that it is a bit early now, but we will land a man on Mars in the next 20 years. Then, like with the moon, there will be a time of stasis, until a real colonization will take place.

There is one place on Mars that is very "low", with higher temperature and denser atmosphere, which would be the logical place for a first settlement.
O2 can be produced from CO2 just like in submarines with scrubbers, and i guess mankind is able to build airtight structures to live in.

In the long run we will have to leave earth, the next "big one" can kill mankind anytime.