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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.

The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Which is why you don't hear NASA going "yep we're good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!" Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.

Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can't remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.

Space colonization is the future, it doesn't matter if it's ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did we even read the same article?

A City on Mars ends with a kind of call to action. The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems. Let’s get the biology and engineering right before we send people to Mars.

The authors aren’t against colonization. They’re against hasty, uninformed, reckless attempts.