I mean, there is still lots of poisonous animals, but Melbourne is not that bad.
Came in here again to post links to Charlie’s discussions on tinned primates (IN SPAAAAACE!) and stopped just to provide a hat tip to you good person!
Also, hats off to RickM with his Steve Jackson Games fu… the fu is strong with this one!
I bought the Ogre reboot and played it a few times with my son, he’s a huge Waryammer 40K! nut and he thought it ‘quaint’. Kids. These days.
I’d go if there was a way back. Unfortunately I’m way too old for this kind of s*it. Nice to think about though.
Brilliant!
I think that’s only the second Bill Shatner cover I’ve ever seen that doesn’t make me physically cringe.
I think the majority of us grew up reading science fiction and can appreciate then sexiness of colonies on Mars. But you can love the idea while still being realistic about the real problems of building a permanent space colony on mars in the immediate future. From what I understand, exploration is plausible. And you know, with repeated exploration we will improve the process and maybe in time the means and the need for a more permanent presence on Mars will become realistically doable. That will be awesome. But in the meantime, the consensus is that we focus on achievable goals. That’s not anti-mars.
How do we survive on Mars, only using technology that exists now or will exist in the near future?
Remember that there are some prominent billionaires who want to do this within the next 20 years. Also remember that we haven’t succeeded in having a self sustaining colony in the Earths least hospitable places, which are far more friendly to life than anywhere on Mars.
I am not saying it is impossible, I am saying that we haven’t done any of the necessary preparation to start a successful colony and without that we may as well be attempting to colonise the Sun.
We haven’t even been able to avoid fucking up the most hospitable places to live, and some of the biggest offenders are the same people who want a fucking Mars colony. What could possibly go wrong with that?
A city on Mars; quite the expensive brand of “wouldn’t this be a really, really cool thing to have!” Any suggestions on how something like that gets funded, and considering what our alienated allies (thanks, Trump) thoughts would be on partnering with the US on what would be an incredibly expensive venture?
Over $23T national debt and ever increasing as we speak. Perhaps that could be addressed by cutting back on loser entitlements, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. /s
FD: I am in the applicable industry. But I and many others where I sit believe we should focus on Earth sciences and on how space exploration can improve the human condition here on Earth before anything else.
Is Common People the other ? Joe Jackson’s vocals actually go really well with his spoken word in that one.
You nailed it! Yes, Common People is the other one in my book.
Metagaming, where Steve Jackson got his start before striking off on his own. I had most of their first Microgames, which were a nice break from massive SPI games that required at least a ping-pong table and a few months to play.
Honestly, I think one thing Star Trek gets entirely correct (which I’ve often also been sort of irritated by) is the need for some sort of globalized society to make space faring possible. I’m kind of not a fan of each civilization being presented as a complete geoculture, but I think you do need the work of billions of people able to work in tandem instead of at odds to pull off something like longer distance space travel and space colonization. it’s not just a problem that money can magically solve. You need people thinking creatively, and considering how our universities (at least here in the US) are systemically being undermined and handed over to corporations more and more, we are even further away from this as a reality than we were in the 1960s.
The more I think about this issue, the less likely it seems to me that the current capitalist system that relies so heavily on competition to maintain itself can make this a reality.
This is my take on it as well. Organizing human beings is also a technology, and it was poorly organized humans that crashed two space shuttles, more than it was poorly understood rocket science.
The way I see it, our economy is just barely coherent enough to support some limited transit opportunities between planetary bodies, but it’s nowhere near the level of supporting ongoing operations, whether thats a lunar, martian, or L-5 facility.
What I think of as a Star Fleet compliant economy, doesn’t need to spend nearly as much greasing the wheels for oligarchs, nor does it spend anywhere as much on military saber-rattling. A dramatically more efficient economy can afford to take the decades/centuries needed to grow a branch all the way out of this gravity well. Until we’ve got that, we’re limited to sending out little messages in little bottles, and hoarding the scraps of signal that come back.
I guess you can call it that? I’d say it’s not so much a science, more an art! 
Of course, as long as we continue to defund the humanities and soft sciences and treat them like lesser forms of knowledge production (precisely because they tend to ask hard questions about society and human nature), the further we move away from that. Technology can do amazing things, but we need to understand how humans interact with each other and how that has changed over time if we expect to build better social structures in the future. The economy, of course, is chief among those. As long as we’re in the mindset of competition and growth as “natural” rather than social constructs, we’re never going to build up social structures that are inclusive and sustaining.
Agreed.
Probably. It’s about figuring out a way to make people understand our commonalities enough to make projects like this feasible.
The real Mars isn’t cool. A real Mars colony would be like a prison camp in Siberia.
If we want Mars but warmer and with oxygen, there are places like that on Earth already
“They’re saying some day we’ll live on Mars.”
“Fucking neo-platonists. Get it through your heads: the crystalline quintessence of the supralunar realm is not merely impenetrable, it is immobile. Even if the Empedoclean stuff we are made of could somehow be transported beyond the realm of natural motion and into the celestial spheres, it would have to displace it first. And where would that æther go to? It is incompressible, it is already a plenum, and it extends to the sphere of fixed stars. So it’s staying fucking put, innit? Accept the fact that the space your ass would fill on Mars is already filled and focus on terrestrial things instead, like the fact that you’ll be lucky to survive the next plague.”
“Yeah, but… they’re saying some day we’ll live on Mars.”
Hahahahh!
Honestly, I laughed so I hard I (literally!) pulled a muscle. Ouch. (-:
But thanks, I needed that. (-:
