If they are a KKKbuplicans, I give it 24 hours.
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Have we learned nothing from The Expanse???
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Are you familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson’s work?
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Thats just the thing, there will never come a day that terraforming other planets to make them habitable will be easier than fixing problems here on Earth. Mars is part of the fairy tale horrible corporate oligarchs tell themselves so that they can remain willfully blind to the harm that there doing because we’ll just leave Earth when we’re done with it. If we can’t summon the resources to fix problems here, there is no chance of fixing the many orders of magnitude harder problems required to live on Mars
The other fairy tale they tell themselves is that they don’t parasitize the rest of society and they would do just fine if it was only a handful of billionaires that left. Both idea are absurdly counterfactual
eta: I see @Punchcard beat me to most of this
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I think you really need to read N. K. Jemisin’s short story Emergency Skin
(pretty sure it is free someplace or another?)
very boingboing-esque (I miss Cory)
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll keep an eye out for it.
I’ve been reading pluralistic.net but yeah I miss having him at BB
Yep, I’m a fan. It’s interesting how his position on space settlement has evolved since his Mars books.
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Ack!
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I remember someone in a 'zine (back in 1988) writing something like this: “Humans have no business traveling to other worlds until they clean up their act here first.”
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So sad when planets can only lift themselves up by putting others down 
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So, Facebook, right?
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They won’t even get to Mars before they start denying that space is an unbreathable vacuum.
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In fact it’s cold as hell.
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We could, you know, actually fix our shit here. Radical proposal, I know, cleaning up after ourselves, but given that colonizing mars is probably a pipedream and even if it wasn’t, it would only be rich assholes like Elon Musk up on the Red planet…
Right? The state of humanity right now is such that there is always going to be some jerk who wants to “stick it to the libs” or whatever, and would do so at their own expense… so long as the people they hate are suffering, they don’t care.
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So like, rich conservatives from California and Arizona, role-playing Galt’s Gulch?
Where do I sign all those people up, and how quickly can we get them there?
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I agree, and I think it comes down to people really not understanding how hard that problem is. Like, living in Antarctica is 1000x easier and people don’t even understand how hard that is.
This is sort of like “the trillion dollar problem”. Peoples’ brains can’t visualize numbers that big (or problems that hard in this case), but we think we can, which makes us even more wrong. This makes people under-appreciate how bad wealth inequality in the US is, for example, or how much of a no-brainer it is to spend trillions preventing climate change.
All that said, I’m certainly strongly in favor of all current Mars exploration and research. I hope to see a base there for research someday. It may make sense as a staging area for further exploration as well, many generations from now. Exploration for exploration’s sake is a valid reason to do so, in my opinion. But long term settlement? That seems like a poor investment of resources for the foreseeable future.
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That’s nice but even JMS knows we need to fix Earth before we can jump into space. We’re a dysfunctional civilization that has limited resilience and that resilience is being over taxed by petty squabbles over territory, nationalism, and capitalism. Until we dismantle those ideologies we will not survive among the stars, not even for a thousand years.
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In fact it’s cold as hell.
