Neil deGrasse Tyson dismisses Musk's Mars dreams. Musk and techbros butthurt

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said he doesn’t think Elon Musk’s vision for space travel to Mars is realistic during a Friday night episode of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher“.

“I don’t see it happening until governments judge that it’s geopolitically in our interest,” he said in conversation with Donna Brazile and Andrew Young.

“But I believe President-elect Trump has some interest in Mars, so you might have another conversation in a couple of months,” the scientist added. “At some point, somebody has to pay for it, and just being interested in something is not the same thing as paying for it.”

Musk fired back suggesting that a trip to Mars would not just help respective countries but could solve age old problems for humanity.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/neil-degrasse-tyson-dismisses-musk-195656600.html

[nuxvomica]

1. Correction: Andrew Sullivan not Andrew Young

The article is from The Hill so they're responsible for that gaffe.

[Woodwizard]

2. Probably

It would be a little bit easier and more cost effective to address the climate issues here but I guess it does not generate the type of attention that a narcissist like musk needs.

[haele]

3. But in his favorite books growing up, we had cities and spaceports on Mars...

Mars is the stepping stone out from Earth to other habitable plants - as soon as hyperspace travel was discovered.

It's a Pants stealing Gnomes situation.
According to the Tech Bro Billionaires:
We improve technology so we can send people to Mars. We send people to Mars. Boom, Hyperport to habitable plants!

No problem.

Haele

[Xolodno]

7. Wrong!

This is how it was presented on South Park.

Phase 1: Collect Underpants.
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Profit!

[haele]

16. I sit corrected...

Phase 1: Gather Taxpayer Money
Phase 2:
Phase 3: Way station on Mars and interstellar exploration
I fixed it.
Haele

[ThoughtCriminal]

4. We really need practical fusion reactors first

When we finally have that, colonizing the Solar System becomes far more practical.

[exboyfil]

26. It is only 20 years away

Check back again in 20 years.

[Ursus Rex]

53. Perennially!

My whole life, it's always been just over the horizon.

[peregrinus]

5. The number of launches required to sustain a colony on Mars

Would be cost prohibitive. You would have to essentially just fire off rockets to Mars nonstop to sustain such a colony. It ain’t happening

[John Shaft]

29. or they might need to get all Star Trek on their ass

and come together planetwide as one, thereby alleviating the need for money and all 8 billion of us work TOGETHER toward the common goal of offworld colonization and space exploration.

But that's why it was a teevee show: humans suck and it ain't happening.

[peregrinus]

31. What would be the point of that?

Colonize some rock in space. There is plenty we need done here.

[Yavin4]

6. I am all for sending Musk to Mars.

And take as many of his followers with him. No matter the cost.

[Crowman2009]

10. With no resupply missions.

Maybe send them a box of bootstraps for shits and giggles.

[Retrograde]

19. They could grow potatoes

I saw this in a movie, so it must be true

[Xolodno]

8. We're having enough trouble just getting back to the moon.

NASA's rocket to get there is over budget and still plagued with problems. Rumor is they may just shut it down. There just isn't enough desire to do it. If China or Russia suddenly gets someone there, then the attitude may change.

[hunter]

18. There may be a few more humans landing on the moon and that will be the end of it...

... probably forever.

If our civilization survives, space beyond low earth orbit will belong to our intellectual offspring, beings specifically designed to survive in harsh outer space environments, beings who can walk naked on the surface of Mars.

Personally, I don't think Musk has done a damned thing to make this world a better place, and a lot of things that are making it worse. He's a flimflam man who dropped out of Stanford, latched onto a bunch of gullible tech-bros, journalists, and politicians, and started feeding.

Trump is a similar creature, drawn from the muck by television.

With any luck our nation will survive this, burned but a little wiser.

[misanthrope]

24. +1,000

Love the second paragraph.

[jimfields33]

51. You think we'd be as far with electric cars without musk?

You think those needing the internet musk provide aren’t happy? Space X is keeping us competitive with China.

The only thing he’s ruined is X. And it’s a dumb social network website.

[hunter]

54. It doesn't matter what powers cars, they all have a huge environmental footprint.

We ought to be rebuilding our cities to make them places where car ownership is unnecessary.

The people with the smallest environmental footprints generally live in cities, don't own cars, and eat mostly vegetarian diets.

I'm not talking about banning cars or anything like that.

Personally I resent the fact that I am forced to own a car to be considered a fully functional adult in this society. I would like to live in a big city with a good public transportation system but those places are expensive, partly because people WANT to live in cities with good public transportation systems. It's the free market at work.

Covering the surface of earth with affordable high speed internet coverage is a bad idea. It will only lead to further exploitation of what little wilderness we have left. Communications in wilderness areas ought to be restricted to emergency uses only and it's okay if that's expensive. Rural areas can be served by fiber.

SpaceX is an environmental catastrophe. So is China.

SpaceX, Tesla, and X are garbage. Musk is a flimflam man, sucking up our tax dollars for his own self-aggrandizement.

[Linda ladeewolf]

9. I always thought of leon

As the bad guy in total recall. Evil through and through, greedy and selfish and ready to kill thousands to preserve what he wants.

[Blue_Tires]

11. It's clear that Melon Husk was always planning to

Establish his own perfect white society on Mars with himself as the Supreme Leader... But now even has to know that it's not happening in his lifetime...

[travelingthrulife]

32. These tech bros (and other Trump cult members)watch way too much science fiction.

I think this is why they believe things like the government makes the weather. They saw the device on Battlestar Galactica, by gum!

[Xavier Breath]

12. "Musk fired back suggesting that a trip to Mars would not just help respective countries but could solve age old...

problems for humanity."

Right, like the age-old problem of how to get Elon Musk off of earth.

[LudwigPastorius]

13. Musk IS correct in that our long-term survival as a species relies on building sustainable colonies on...

other bodies in the solar system. It is not if, but when, a giant rock or comet will smack the Earth and wipe us out.

However, Leon is incorrect in thinking that it can be done by one man, one government, or the combination of the two.
The realistic cost to get a Mars colony up and running is $2 trillion. It would have to be a multi-national effort between governments and private enterprise.

Then, lots of additional money will then be needed to make it self-sustainable, if that is possible.

[muriel_volestrangler]

34. $2 trillion? Way too low.

The IRA was for $891 billion of spending, and that's just bits and pieces of spending on Earth. The infrastructure required to build an airtight (and radiation-protected) living environment, method of extracting water and oxygen for living, growing food and fuelling rockets back to Earth, and all the energy required to run it, is huge.

The mass extinctions the Earth has seen so far would wipe out modern civilization, sure, but humans are adaptable enough (able to move to the best places on the planet, use a wide variety of plants and animals for food) to be one of the species to survive. The most deadly event in the past to us would have been "Snowball Earth", but that doesn't seem to have asteroids or comets as a possible initiator - indeed, we might have been able to prevent that with greenhouse gases.

[Johnny2X2X]

56. Terra forming

So to colonize other planets would likely take remaking those planets' environments to sustain human life. Especially Mars, that's what Musk thinks is feasible, to create an atmosphere on Mars and introduce or reconstitue the water that is there.

My thought is, wouldn't it be infinitely easier to repair earth's environment than to build one from scratch on a planet 50 million miles away?

Musk has watched one too many scifi movies, terrforming another planet is inconceivable in the next 20 generations of humanity. We'll long have solved earth's climate problems before we approach being able to terraform Mars.

And it's not as easy as atmosphere and water. The soil there is dust and not suitable in any way for growing food. In order to grow food for even a small colony, you'd need to ship thousands of tons of fertile soil from earth. And there are a thousand other challenges.

In short, fix earth, that's more doable than creating a livable planet on Mars.

[jmowreader]

14. Oh Cthulhu. I actually got in a discussion with Musk himself on Quora about Mars

He posted a question under his own name asking if going to Mars was going to be a groundbreaking thing. I pointed out a few reasons why it wouldn't be. He replied that we needed to go to Mars to save the human race.

I returned a comment - not wanting to piss the guy off, but just to be constructive - telling him that a better way to "save the human race" is to use his massive engineering and manufacturing footprint to invent a diesel fuel that puts less carbon into the atmosphere than was taken out to make it - because there are a lot of things, like highway construction, where electrification of the diesel fleet is unfeasible. Strangely enough, he thought that was a good idea.

[Abolishinist]

48. How cool!

[GeorgeLittle1]

15. Moon and Mars bases..

I think those are great ideas, sooner the better. Extend humanity now or you hate humanity and want it confined.

[Lulu KC]

20. Not sure I'm following you

Can you say more on this?

[GeorgeLittle1]

21. I said

Having human bases on the moon and Mars is a good idea.

What don't you follow on that? It's an objectively true idea. Leaving all life to this planet when we can and will expand life to other planets as backups is a good thing, like Musk says.

[Lulu KC]

22. Like Musk says

Okay. Good night.

[GeorgeLittle1]

23. Goodnight

[Hekate]

46. The other poster is polite, but right. A person asking you to expand on your thought to make it...

..it more intelligible is asking for a better answer than “it’s self-evident” which is next thing to a tautology. You are trying to be cute, GeorgeLittle1 — and dodging because you don’t have the answers, just F&SF slogans.

[exboyfil]

28. Moon makes sense for proximity

It would be like the Antarctic with just a few. It should be a location for storage if information both in servers and some hardened form (Data discs and microfiche). A seed library and an embryo library of a variety of different species. Colonization should be with O'Neill cylinders - first in orbit and then at L5.

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. Not "objectively". The feasible possibilities of setting up independent colonies there are far more difficult

than fixing things on Earth. Humans are built for our gravity and atmosphere, and the constant struggle to maintain a suitable atmosphere elsewhere (and availability of water, plant nutrients and so on) make them a worse place than anywhere on Earth (Antarctica is a positive Eden in comparison).

[marble falls]

30. Extend humanity to places that physics will not ever support life?

[Crunchy Frog]

44. I don't hate humanity, but at this point I think it's best off effectively quarantined.

[ismnotwasm]

17. How is effective radiation shielding coming along Elon?

[misanthrope]

25. The 500-lb gorilla in the room

Mars once had liquid water and other things that we might think of as being integral for life. What happened to it? It was all stripped away by the solar winds because (lean in kids) MARS HAS NO MAGNETOSPHERE. Well, not one strong and widespread enough to protect it like the one here on Earth.

With current technology, we aren't even close to being able to colonize Mars. It is still a pipe dream more suited for fiction.

More urgent matters for science and engineering resources right now are:
-mitigating the effects of climate change.
-developing new energy sources that don't exacerbate greenhouse gas accumulation.
-Countering the spread of microplastics throughout the biosphere.
-discovering and charting all Near Earth Objects as well as other solar system flotsam that might collide with Earth.
-developing contingency plans for possible strikes by large objects from space.

[exboyfil]

27. Yes

Also the soil on Mars is filled with perchlorate. Except for the possible existence of life or fossil evidence of life, Mars is pretty useless. A second abiotic origin would be game changing. A common origin through panspermia would be highly informative.

Not a great location for colonization. Hollowed out asteroids for O'Neill cylinders makes a lot more sense.

[misanthrope]

40. Musk's fixation on Mars

Abundant evidence shows Mars colonization to be a complete folly in the context of current conditions. It is a black hole of limited resources (including time).

Musk's continued fixation on the idea despite commonly accessible knowledge reveals that he isn't even close to being the science-minded, fact-based genius he believes himself to be. It is plain and obvious.

[edhopper]

36. Exactly

it's deadly and we are a long way from a practical solution.

[Irish_Dem]

33. For Musk the Mars thing is mostly a huge government funded grift and some psychotic delusion.

[NowsTheTime]

37. Elon spend your own money...oh wait you have a plan "doge" cut govt services, "entitlements".That's where you get $

[gulliver]

38. The only good reason to go to Mars is "because it's there"

That's a really good reason. And the trip needs to be two-way like with the Apollo missions. I would support that. The science is beside the point. A few of us walking on Mars and coming back would be good for the human spirit. If we could do it jointly with other countries, it would be good for cooperation.

[NowsTheTime]

39. Then again saving the planet from climate catastrophe would be good for the human spirit & cooperation.

[gulliver]

41. The idea that they are mutually exclusive is easy to fall prey to.

That apparent (usually illusory) conflict arises with every pair of endeavors that cost resources. Shouldn't we be doing A before B? The usual answer to this standard argument is, "We can chew gum and walk at the same time." In this case, we might even take it a step further and say, "If we offer each other a few sticks of gum from time to time, we'll feel more like walking together as we chew the gum."

[NowsTheTime]

45. If time & $$ were not issues, I would agree with you. These are both big ticket items. Trump further delays climate.

[StarryNite]

42. If that stupid f*ck cared about humanity he wouldn't have thrown in with trump.

[Rafi]

43. Tyson is a pompous ass.

Insufferable often.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

47. As compared to Musk?

Sounds like you have the two confused.

[Stuckinthebush]

50. Right?

SMH. Tyson a pompous ass my ass.

[Rafi]

55. Both can be true.

and are

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

57. But aren't

[UTUSN]

49. Knr

[JohnSJ]

52. Why wait. Send musk personally to mars NOW.

[VGNonly]

58. Environmental catastrophe

followed by economic and societal collapse will occur long before space colonies are ever practical.