"We Aren't Going to Mars"

[Binkie The Clown]

If we can’t keep Earth livable, we can’t make a dead rock in outer space livable and keep it that way. Thus, we’ve nowhere else to go. We must take care of this planet, but we aren’t. Why? We are using the wrong criteria for deciding when to act.

[Matthew28]

1. We can do both

And quite easily if we wished to do so.

There's no reason why not. The resources also would help increase the size of our economy and easily make up for doing so.

[Duppers]

3. Easily??

You do not know all the problems such space travel would entail. And billions of $.

"The resources"? What resources are you referring to?

[hatrack]

11. Trillions of $$

Oh, yeah and we'll "geoengineer" the atmosphere on Mars, which is about 1% the density of our atmosphere and we'll use sciencetechnologymagic to do it . .

[DetlefK]

5. Mars is dead. We would have to geoengineer a whole planet. From afar.

Mars is too far away from the Sun to be habitable. He's too cold.

Mars has no planetary magnetic field and no ozone layer. There's too much cosmic radiation.

Without a protective magnetic field, the solar wind has eroded Mars' atmosphere.



Let's say we bring primitve organisms like cyanobacteria to Mars and they start converting the surface of Mars into oxygen and other gases.
How long would it take for them to produce a few trillion tons of gas?

And how do we protect the cynobacteria from the extreme conditions?

And how do we protect the atmosphere from erosion?

[PJMcK]

12. Excellent points

Mars is the wrong place to go.

The ability to terraform a planet is far beyond our technology. We probably can't even send astronauts to Mars safely.

There are other places in our Solar System to study. Europa would be a good start.

However, this is our only planet. We need to protect it or our species is doomed.

In fact, we're doomed anyway.

[Rainbow Droid]

6. Please explain. Because those statements, in order, are: True, False, False, ???WTF???

We can do both.

There's nothing easy about either one.

There are plenty of obvious reasons why we shouldn't go to Mars right now, and that's actually the entire point of this thread.

And I have no idea what that last sentence is trying to say. The two most obvious possibilities are that

"The resources on Mars would make the project worth it"
(more wrong than Arnold Rimmer on an average Tuesday)

and

"The resources we spend to do it would drive our economy"
(Haven't we had enough of the fiction that is 'Trickle Down Oligonomics'?)

[ismnotwasm]

22. We havent solved the problem of radiation in space travel

Women are particularly susceptible to ovarian cancer if I recall correctly

[democratisphere]

2. Overpopulation and a total aversion to conservation of everything and anything

make our future questionable at best. Human greed is our own demise.

[struggle4progress]

4. +

[Duppers]

7. + a million!

Dr. Schultze is right.
And Hawking, although was brilliant about somethings, contradicted himself about others.

[KY_EnviroGuy]

8. Can't wait 'till the first rigged election, school shooting or world war...

on Mars.....

As a scientist, I say we best get our shit together here first.

Thanks for posting this, Binkie!................

[smirkymonkey]

9. K&R

[TheSmarterDog]

10. Then humanity is doomed to extinction.

And it's going to hurt the entire time.

[Ilsa]

13. Maybe, hopefully, not extinction, just the deaths of

Six or seven billion people, leaving a few million to fight over the remaining resources. Hopefully.

But "hope" isn't a plan.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. "it's going to hurt the entire time"

What does that mean?

Anyway, as explained in the video, and comments above, it's far easier to create a livable habitat on Earth than on Mars. Even in the days after the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous period, most of Earth was far more livable than Mars. It had oxygen, water, and soil, in abundance. It's far easier to fix Earth than transform Mars. It's far easier to build and run a biodome on Earth than on Mars.

[TheSmarterDog]

17. Same could've been said to argue against humans leaving Africa 2 mill yrs ago

And dismisses the very real possibility that the knowledge we need to solve the problems here will be found out there.

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. No. The environment outside Africa was still compatible with human life

That on Mars is not.

"The very real possibility that the knowledge we need to solve the problems here will be found out there."

Is what sense at all is that 'real'? Or even relevant to your claim that humanity is 'doomed to extinction', or that "it's going to hurt the entire time"? The video is not arguing against space exploration; it's saying that the claim that we need to start living on Mars is illogical.

[TheSmarterDog]

20. Most places on Earth are incompatible with human life.

But - even though we had no way of knowing what the environment outside of Africa was like until we went there - we have the ability to gain knowledge & make tools to allow us to survive there. We won't be going to Mars naked. It will be no different.

OTOH, if we neglect to gain more knowledge, and refuse to develop new tools to survive in the increasingly hostile environment on Earth, we will not survive here. Expanding into space is part & parcel of that.

By arguing against human expansion into space, Dr Schulze is dooming humanity to extinction. Just as all the other hominids humanity evolved with have gone extinct. We were smart enough to expand beyond Africa.

[berni_mccoy]

14. We are going to Mars. And yes, we have to protect our planet as if our lives depend on it.

Both can be true. We need to explore the solar system and beyond to continue the species. The planet has limits that we are quickly approaching. We will need resources beyond the Earth's abundant supply. At the same time, we need to optimize how we use its precious resources.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Which resources do you think Mars has that we're running out of? (nt)

[Egnever]

21. Mars would not be the end goal

It is a stepping stone. Actual resources on Mars are irrelevant.

[ffr]

18. Exactly the point that must be addressed. If we can live here, we can't live there.

We've been given life's ecosystem on silver platter and we're the species overpopulating and sucking on the resource nipple like no other, killing off every other species in the process. If we somehow made life on Mars habitable, there's every reason to believe we couldn't live within that ecosystem either.