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The concentration of perchlorates in Martian soil approaches 1%- while here on earth we consider it highly toxic in parts per million. If Andy Weir's Mark Watney had actually eaten those potatoes he grew in the regolith he would have died. Perchlorates, great for making rocket fuel, are toxic to plants too. In order to grow plants on Mars, the perchlorates- and probably other toxins- would need to first be removed, possibly by bacterial processing. The science and bioengineering of this is in its infancy.

Mars could probably be visited by humans in the near future, but we are many decades away, at least, from being able to live there.

Meanwhile, environmental catastrophe, which we DO have the technical understanding to avert, looms here on Earth. The cost of preventing that catastrophe is roughly equivalent to the projected costs of the Martian Fantasy.

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Cillizza is not great.

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Mar 27, 2023·edited Mar 27, 2023

Ugh...the "it's going to take a long time and cost us money" argument about why we shouldn't do something.

From the point of a researcher, who's heard that same argument after proposing we start a research project...after being told how this has been a problem for years, or that it's going to be important in the future...my response is always:

Well, it's going to take a while and cost money in 10 years, too.

I'm sure Cegłowski would have written the same thing in 1962 about Kennedy wanting to go to the moon. Oh, and he'd be smuggly telling us 30 years later how right he was because we went, then never went back. What a waste of money, am I right?

Oh, and not all of us who think we should invest in this are of the "transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die." Good grief. What a strawman he dowsed in gasoline and took a match to.

And, finally, $500B over the next twenty years - $25B/year, really isn't that much for a country with a $30T economy.

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I think the last part of the article sums it up. The very rich want an escape hatch after their multi-trillion dollar corporations have destroyed this planet for the rest of mankind.

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founding

Yep - Mars exploration is a boondoggle and waste of time and money for no identifiable human gain. It’s a matter of “faith” (?) well, maybe I’m biased, no, I am biased. As someone who at age 15 witnessed the small leap for mankind in a grainy B&W TV from a seaside town in Yucatán Mexico, I’m in it for the next step , Mars. And, unlike the NASA of 1960-69, any exploratory missions will be competition based - just like the 15th and 16th century endeavors that were not about “faith” but about $$$$ for their sponsors - more about this another time - I’m busy at Costco with my wife

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Of course the *first* thing we should do, is set up a proper permanent presence on the Moon.

Aside from planting the flag and saying that we did it, there is little to be gained from going to Mars ourselves (that is, aside from robotic exploration) in the near future. Anything like colonization would be prohibitively difficult, not least because of all the stresses that low gravity and radiation would impose on the human body. Another major problem with a human stay on Mars of any duration is the problem of terrestrial dust on planetary bodies that don't have natural erosion processes. We have already seen this problem on the Moon, and it will be major challenge for setting up a base there.

Much more doable as the first planet for us to colonize, would be Venus. Not a surface habitation, of course - but in settlements in the upper atmosphere, where temperatures and pressures would be close to Earth-like. Take a look at the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kroU3SfCXE8

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Thanks for great recommendation about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's newsletter! Just subscribed.

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founding

The Mars discussion is interesting, but ultimately an abstract exercise. One might as well speculate on the chances of all the air molecules in your bedroom randomly migrating to one half of its volume.

If humans ever do go to Mars, it won't be done by Americans. The technical challenges are prodigious, but even in aggregate and doubled that is not the limiting constraint. The limiting constraint is our collapsing culture and governance, and the fabric of our society unravelling faster and faster each year.

Project the arc of our national nescience since 1990 or so another decade or two forward and by the earliest conceivable date the technical hurdles to a human Mars mission could in the best case scenario be overcome, Congress will have long since mandated NASA use prayer AI's to guide mission trajectories, and the National Science advisor will have formed Protocols of the Elders of Zion study teams for evidence that George Soros globalists are plotting to build Jewish Space Lasers.

This is a nation where the governing political faction wants to balance the budget, not by raising revenue and/or reducing expenditure, but by banning drag shows.

This is a nation where the top Republican party officials believe demons and Jews secretly control the world.

This is a nation where the governing majority looks at the greatest works of art their culture has created and their only takeaway is that someone made a naughty,; that the only difference between Michelangelo's David and a scrawled sharpie-inked outline of a phallus on a bathroom partition is -- no difference. And for that matter wouldn't know phallus from a bust of Pallas.

This land of exponentially exploding ignorance and idiocy is going to figure out how to get to Mars? Give us a break.

The Chinese, maybe. Not America.

I will say, though, to the extent that sending humans to Mars is a fool's errand, there is a reasonable chance Americans will take it into their heads to want to do it.

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founding
Mar 26, 2023·edited Mar 26, 2023

40 percent of the electorate would vote for Trump even if he disassembled a whimpering puppy with his bare hands and ate the raw pieces on television in front of the the crying child owner of the dog and then laughed at the kid. A quarter of those would do so reluctantly, the vulgarity of the thing being somewhat regrettable, but necessary to prevent the White House from being occupied by a person who might refer to people by their preferred pronouns. Another quarter will just vote for him for no real reason at all, just habit or cluelessness. The remaining half would cast their vote with enthusiasm because that's showing how to take on the Libs and the RINOs, and afterwards go home and tweet links to the video to all their friends and neighbors.

Bear in mind, this is America, where the average citizen is so intelligent and reasons so effectively that he chooses to spend $266 per year or more on bottled water that costs him 1,110 times as much that way as it does coming out of the tap at home. We can confidently expect him to apply the same degree of perspicacity to public affairs.

Of the remaining 60 percent of the electorate, half will vote for the Democrat for whatever reason, and the other half is up for grabs. At least half of those will vote for the Republican this time because whatever, and they are sick and tired of not having gas get cheaper and cheaper, and they wanted a pony for Christmas but didn't get one -- or they did get one, but the oats cost money, and they didn't realize there would also be a lot of manure to deal with. And if there is a recession (odds very good, look at the yield curve!) and/or the dollar has collapsed because the House has precipitated a default, and there is a banking crisis and China has moved on Taiwan and any number of other such chickens even now homing in on 2024 have come to roost, that's it.

I can't see the odds of any Republican carrying the election at less than at least 3 out of 5.

I am old enough to remember Jimmy Carter running for office promising to try and give the American people a government that was as good as they are.

It's taken a while, but I think his promise is very likely to finally be fulfilled.

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I am so proud of Kareem - His words are logical, reasonable, and kindly the truth. Tim Miller's book

writing on Bulwark, and appearing on MSNBC are wonderful. I was receiving the Bulwark limited free edition. My wonderful niece Jennifer purchased a year's membership of the Bulwark. A great gift for my "Spontaneous 70s" Birthday.

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A lot of merit to your theory. How to break the media of those bad habits, though? The survival of democracy depends on doing so.

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Mar 26, 2023·edited Mar 26, 2023

So, about the anti-Mars nonsense:

1.) The author could have spared 10,000 words, because anyone who honestly believes that NASA is focused on Mars colonization right now is not paying attention to what they're doing.

Their focus is on going back to the Moon, in concert with the signatories of the Artemis Accords--and they are more than willing to leave any Mars heavy lifting beyond technology research to the private sector, their rhetoric notwithstanding. (The author glancingly mentions said private sector in the final few paragraphs, if only to shit on it. More on that in a minute.)

2.) The "half a trillion dollars plus $100 billion per mission" figure, though the author doesn't explicitly reference it, is pulled from a study commissioned by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. That study has been used to discredit manned extraterrestrial space exploration in general ever since, despite the passage of time and technology since. Which brings me to--

3.) The author begins the essay with "Landing on Mars with existing technology".

No fool in their right mind, in government or business, thinks it is a good idea to land on Mars with existing technology.

ISRU fuel production in particular (of either methane or hydrogen fuel, using Martian resources) is generally believed to be a bare minimum advance needed to get a Mars mission cost within anything tolerable ($20 billion per mission is the target, if "Mars Direct" is to be believed). To say nothing of creating oxygen from the atmosphere (a la MOXIE), extracting water from the environment, etc.

This has been an understood mission requirement for basically everyone thinking about this in both government and the private sector over the last 20 years, from NASA STMD to Elon Musk to Blue Origin. It is only not understood by those who haven't been paying attention.

I can only conclude the author has not been paying attention--because not only does the author fail to mention it, he inaccurately asserts that any envisioned human-supporting systems would be "closed-loop". This is false, and based on outdated assumptions.

The author does make a good point that the state of this technology is primitive at best. It would need to be advanced in a revolutionary hurry in order for any kind of credible Mars mission to happen in the next 20 years. But, to reference great feats of yesteryear, crazier things have happened.

4.) This last one is a matter of opinion, but: The main reason to send humans into space is not knowledge. We can, in fact, do that with computers and robots.

The main reason to send humans into space is to show that humans can live and work in space, for its own sake. I think that's a worthy goal and we should do it.

Taxpayers may disagree. And if government were the only way to get that done, I would agree with the notion that we shouldn't do it. But I think recent events have shown the ability of the private sector, in partnership with the government, to achieve great things.

For the record, I agree with the author's clearly implied insinuation that Elon Musk has lost his mind of late, and that he shouldn't be trusted with said great things. Good thing there is more than one person in the private sector.

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I'm so glad you pointed out Kareem the last time you posted something from his substack. I'm now a paid subscriber. He's great.

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founding

Bill Maher did a great anti-Mars bit: https://youtu.be/mrGFEW2Hb2g

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1) I am not going to claim any prescience here. And I acknowledge that even the slightest chance that Trump would win in 2024 scares the crap out of me. But when I start worrying too much, I ask myself this question: which states that Biden won in 2020 could Trump flip in 2024? The three most likely to me are Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. That adds up to 33 EV’s. That would still leave Biden with 273 EV’s. So Trump would have to flip at least one more state. So if the blue wall holds, we should be good.

Still it’s bad enough that anyone would even consider voting for Trump let alone that he might actually win.

2) I really enjoy listening to and reading Abdul-Jabber’s thoughts. He’s been through a lot and yet he still presents his views clearly and without the histrionics so common nowadays. And once again, he is spot on about the drag show issue. Besides being a completely manufactured crisis, it’s always amazing to me how Republicans, the supposed party of parental rights, is working so hard to usurp those rights when it comes to drag shows. But consistency has never been a particular strength of those folks.

3) There are way too many indirect impacts of funding a trip to Mars for me to really understand whether it’s a good idea or not. All I have are some points and questions:

a) Many people act as if we would just not spend the money on space travel, we could solve so many of our current other issues. I just don’t see that.

b) The idea that Mars would be Earth 2 is ludicrous.

c) There is no doubt that there are ancillary benefits from space travel simply because some new things will have to be invented. But the question is whether we could achieve those benefits by Earth-orbit space travel or even going to the Moon. Do we have to go to Mars? And maybe we would get a lot of those benefits by sending robots to Mars.

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Sadly the arguments against going to Mars have some pretty big flaws, starting with this assertion:

"And once the rockets had retired to their museums, humanity would have nothing to show for its Mars adventure except some rocks and a bunch of unspeakably angry astrobiologists."

Judging from the technological developments that arose from he Apollo missions to the moon, that bald assertion is highly likey to be wrong:

https://www.theceomagazine.com/business/innovation-technology/nasa-moon-landing-items/

https://theconversation.com/four-surprising-technological-innovations-that-came-out-of-the-apollo-moon-landings-119605

https://christopherrcooper.com/apollo-program-cost-return-investment/

Would we have developed these technologies eventuallly? Yeah, probably most, but not necessarly all. And the timing of certain innovations wil inevitably save lives.

For example one of the technologies whose development was radically accelerated by the Apollo program was the CAT scan. Even if it would have inevitably been developed 5-10 years later, that signifies 5-10 years where the techonology would have been unavailable to detect cancer, tumours, and other diseases of the body.

We also have freeze dried foods that again, would have likely eventually been developed, but in the delay interim these foods wouldn't be available for emergency survival kits that have saved countless lives.

Then there is the cost. It is estimated that the first mission to Mars will cost about $500 Billion. But given that this won't be achieved for at least another 27 years, that works out at $18.5 billion dollars in funding per year.

That sounds like a lot of money but it would only represent 3.19% of the U.S. annual budget. The U.S. government literally spends twice of that amount in just servicing the interest on its national debt.

And no, going to Mars would NOT, "... cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war." That's just ignorant. 20 years in Afghanistan cost a total of $2.3 trillion over 20 years, which is 4.6 x more money than the Mars program would cost.

I get it, Maciej Cegłowski REALLY doesn't see value in going to Mars. But his arguments are unfortunately based on false premises.

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