I don’t think anyone is trying to change him. A do think it’s on us in this age of run-away fake news to push back against such nonsense. You dont want to, okay. But if not your responsibility, or mine, whose?
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clearly your friend has a confirmation bias. That’s a much easer explanation than the idea that people got together, worked as a team, and achieved something amazing. /s
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Case by case basis… This has little to do with the current phenomenon of politicised fake news and in this case the guy is hijacking the thread with an old, ridiculous and thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” basically. Debating him does more damage to the discussion, which is about crewed spaceflight now, than simply ignoring (and flagging) him. Just my opinion. I mean just look at the thread. What a mess.
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Sounds like a it’s a fantastic reason for you to not engage in this case with that trolley.
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Sorry, I don’t get what you are trying to convey to me here. I wasn’t engaging with him. Are you being sarcastic?
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constructed a laser of sufficient (pretty sure illegal) power,
As far as I know, there is no restriction of private laser ownership in US or UK law (not sure about other countries). It’s only sale that’s controlled.
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Lasers are heavily controlled in Australia. You need a license to own a professional laser surveying rig for example. I had a chance to buy a powerful laser in a swap meet. It could deliver about as much heat as a decent magnifying glass on a hot day. I left it because it illegal to own and I didn’t want the liability.
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Sadly no. Within a century exoplanet astronomy will give us a list of nearby earth-ish planets with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres. But if we ever spent the vast fortune to send a robot probe to one, our distant descendants will learn that at best, it is already inhabited by bacteria that would regard us as a tasty snack and which our immune systems would be ill prepared to combat against. At worst, its air or water would be contaminated with trace compounds in concentrations that are lethal to us. Even given magic FTL starships, The likelihood of our ever finding another planet on which we could live as we do on earth is extremely small. Given tens or hundreds of thousands of years, we might be able to terraform a world to be earth-ish enough for us to live on it… But we would need a place to live in the meanwhile. Better take good care of the home we have.
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Consider a world where the initial probe to a remote star will mass a few grams, and travel close to the speed of light. By that time humans live habitually in robot bodies, and have no particular need of oxygen and nitrogen. Human personalities can be transmitted by radio and loaded into bodies built by nanotech.
Okay I am channeling Greg Egan here, but I think the futurism is solid.
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In an interview during the past couple of years, Elon Musk called on a colony on Mars as an insurance policy for the human race. That has stuck in my mind ever since. Imagine, putting human colonies out in space as an insurance policy for the survival of the human species. As a child growing up in the 60s and 70s I recall a lot of science fiction movies and books that addressed this topic. It’s time now, with climate change and a population explosion.
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“Aaaagh!”
“What is up, Xzywlop?”
“I was just looking at the Earth hanging in the sky over our secret Moonbase, and some fecker shot me in the eye with a laser beam!”
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In this Elon Musk is an idiot. There is no freaking way we can build a self-sustaining mars colony that could survive the destruction of humanity back on earth. Not now, and not anytime in the next century or so. Not anytime before we will need to demonstrate that we are competent to take care of and safeguard the earth, which to date we have not done so by a long shot.
Even if we do acquire the necessary competence in biology and ecosystems and closed loop life support systems (which right now we are nowhere near to having), to be self sustaining, you would have to build up your offworld colony’s industry and population to be at least equal to that of a country like Germany, just to have all the necessary specialists and enabling industries that would allow your colonists to buld replacement parts for the machines to make the machines to make the life-support systems that would keep them alive.
And to sustain those industries in the long term, you would need millions more people, to staff the schools and universities and day care centers in order to raise new generations of highly skilled workers to take over from their parents in order to build replacements for the machines to build the machines to build the life-support systems that will keep them alive. And yet millions more people because some of the childen will want to go off and be scientists or artists or truck drivers rather than engineers and technicians.
To be honest, I don’t want to live in the kind of dystopia that would be required to dragoon a couple hundred million highly skilled workers to go off and live in an overgrown bomb shelter on a waterless, almost airless, lifeless planet hundreds of millions of km from home just so humanity can have an “insurance policy”.
That’s like saying that an insurance policy on your home should consist of buying a second home in case the first one burns down, rather than making sure that the wiring and the heating and cooking appliances in your home are safe in the first place.
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I hope you are being sarcastic. Because that’s an even bigger bundle of impossible magic tech than an interstellar starship.
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Indeed we can’t yet build a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica.
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Maybe we have, and they’re just hiding it from us.
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Musk isn’t claiming his mars colony is going to be self-sustaining in the next century or so. He just believes that you don’t get a self-sustaining mars colony without first making a non-self-sustaining mars colony. Since we don’t already have a non-self-sustaining mars colony, he thinks that it is logical to try to create one as a first and necessary step to a (later) self-sustaining mars colony.
And, like, duh.
You’ve demonstrated enough scientific knowledge here that you obviously know the atmosphere and magnetosphere filter out the vast majority of the solar radiation incident to them. And you probably know that the environmental impact of making solar panels is actually quite high relative to the amount of energy that can be harnessed with them. And you probably also realize that these solutions aren’t mutually exclusive in the first place.
And, like, duh. At the very least, you could be less smug about strawmanning a position you disagree with.
This is coming from someone who thinks human being are and should be creatures of earth. You don’t do this perspective any favors when you overstate your case, strawman your opponents, and then get smug and arrogant about how scientifically illiterate it is to disagree with you.
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Come on we are surrounded by impossible magic tech, by the standards of 100 years ago.
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Using narrative logic, that makes sense. Using engineering logic, there are problems with robot bodies and transmitting consciousness via EM that do not apply to making smart phones and 4g towers.
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There are, though, rules about what you can point at the sky, and where.
@Glaurung [quote=“Glaurung, post:65, topic:92384”]
There is no freaking way we can build a self-sustaining mars colony that could survive the destruction of humanity back on earth. Not now, and not anytime in the next century or so.
[/quote]
Right now, absolutely not. A century from now… I’m a whole lot less sure, a lot can happen in a hundred years. But let’s say it does take a hundred years. So what? There’s a whole lot of young people alive today who will still be alive then. Heck, I might be, depending on the rate of progress in medicine. Am I not supposed to care about that?
Besides, is it not sometimes worthwhile to put a down payment on a project that will take over a hundred years? I mean, there are cathedrals that people spent well over a century building. Is mankind no longer capable of thinking like that?
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I do not think @AcerPlatanoides is being sarcastic with you, rather quite sincere; you have stated an excellent case for you to not engage the nutter, but not for him to refrain from doing so.
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