"Mars Sucks" billboard shows up in front of SpaceX HQ to celebrate Earth Day

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Originally published at: "Mars Sucks" billboard shows up in front of SpaceX HQ to celebrate Earth Day | Boing Boing

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i don’t agree, but well played.

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Same.

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This is how Wars of the Worlds get started.

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Mars; that place has no atmosphere.

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As President of the Martian Coalition, I beg to differ. Martians everywhere, Unite!

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I tend to agree with Earth on this one. I understand the desire to set foot on Mars in order to satisfy the urge to be the first (not that I share it), but I really don’t understand the idea of settling Mars. Mars is a shithole. Anyone settling there will live out a stultifying, hermetically-sealed, socially-engineered, hellish existence, completely divorced from nature for the rest of their lives. Their “experience” of Mars will take place entirely behind glass. They will never actually interact personally with the planet itself. I can’t imagine the desire to live like that.

I just don’t get it, and this is coming from someone whose career is oriented around space.

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Yeah, it’s the final frontier.

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We’re anticipating the day where what you describe is still a better existence than we’ve made possible on Earth.

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Now, if Mars was a bit more like Risa, that I could get behind.

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If it comes to that, humanity is fucked, Mars base or no.

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If the last year hasn’t been enough to show people that kind of existence wouldn’t work long term then nothing will. I’ll bet £10 on someone trying to break the sealed environment to let the air in within a year.

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Yeah, if you can build a hermetically sealed, self-sufficient habitat for Mars, there is a lot of real estate in West Texas, the continental shelves and Antarctica where it makes INFINITELY more sense. Pressure, magnetosphere, and a chance at Amazon Prime shipping. Still, I don’t see people falling over themselves for nuclear submarine-style living in fricking Barstow.

There is no cataclysm that makes Earth less hospitable than Mars. Slam the K-T impactor into us again and detonate all the nukes simultaneously (the second being a rounding error to the first), Earth still wins. Remember, yeah the big dinos died, but plenty of Earth’s diversity survived, while Mars is a blasted hellscape.

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Theoretically a second Theia Impact might make Earth at least temporarily less hospitable than Mars, but at least we’d get another moon out of the deal when everything settled back down after a few tens of millions of years.

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You might try the Lady Astronaut series by Mary Robinette Kowal.

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Interesting. Sounds like a similar premise to Neil Stephenson’s Seveneves (which I had mixed feelings about).

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They’re not really alike at all.

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I’ve heard it ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid.

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Personally, think we should be spending at least the same amount of money figuring out how to safely live underwater.

Also, at first glance of the reduced thumbnail of the billboard, I thought the image was of a dusty, banged up door of a red Tesla like the one they sent to fly by Mars. I doubt that the paint has held up well over its journey.

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I’m sure the storytelling is very different, “Earth just got irrevocably fucked up by a big space impact and humanity’s only hope for survival is to throw all its resources into space colonization project” does sound like a very similar premise.