In the trailer, there's this line: "When Musk says that the future of humanity is to colonize Mars, he is selling us dreams. That's not happening."
That irritates me a lot. Everything extremely difficult (or thought to be impossible) is a dream until someone (or some company) works hard on it and invests in it for a long time. Those that would criticize Musk & SpaceX for chipping away at this seem to be effectively saying "do not try."
Funny, for me it's the opposite: I get extremely irritated when Musk or someone else says the future of humanity is to colonize Mars. If you think you can turn a bare rock into a livable planet, please do something about Earth and global warming first.
It comes up every so often. If you're actually putting in enough effort to make a proper colony, and not e.g. McMurdo Station but colder and redder and the air's unbreathable even in summer and the soil's poison, then an artificial magnetosphere is not a huge additional cost.
It's way beyond what we can do right now, but then again, at time of writing Starship has yet to have been in a circular orbit, so all aspects of a Mars colony are way beyond what we can do right now.
jfoster · · focus · HN ↗
That irritates me a lot. Everything extremely difficult (or thought to be impossible) is a dream until someone (or some company) works hard on it and invests in it for a long time. Those that would criticize Musk & SpaceX for chipping away at this seem to be effectively saying "do not try."
gregschlom · · focus · HN ↗
ebcode · · focus · HN ↗
So the first thing we'd want to do is activate a magnetosphere on Mars. I rarely see anyone talking about that[2].
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
[1] <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/real-martians-how-to-protect-astronauts-from-space-radiation-on-mars/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/heliophysics/real-mart...
[2] <a href="https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe/" rel="nofollow">https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/how-to-give-mars-an-atmos...
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
It's way beyond what we can do right now, but then again, at time of writing Starship has yet to have been in a circular orbit, so all aspects of a Mars colony are way beyond what we can do right now.