By all rights, this should be something I am deeply passionate about. I’ve been in tech/engineering my entire adult life and was obsessed with NASA as a kid. I even live on the east coast of Florida and can sometimes see the launches/landings over the ocean. But I just… don’t care at all. I’m not suffering from depression or any other malaise, and generally things are fine. But I haven’t clicked on a single link or looked at a single image. I know this has not been the case for many, many people, so I’m wondering what might be different about this launch (or really the whole program in general), and curious if anyone else has found themselves feeling the same.
That’s complete and utter bullshit.
“Frontline of humanity” what does that even mean, historically? Humanity has always been spread across the earth.
I see absolutely no evidence for this historically, what I see is just people in the Middle Ages trying to brand themselves as the successors to Rome for PR.
The idea of Mars becoming an “empire” is pure fantasy. We can’t even begin to talk about the lack of natural resources when there’s literally no air. Maybe in 40,000 years or something, but not on any foreseeable timescale.
This is straight up magical thinking. You might as well say that someone has to sacrifice a virgin goat on the night that the stars are in alignment for the US empire to end. There is zero logical or causal connection between those things, and empires don’t just last “eternally” unless somebody casts the right magic spell.
Similarly, the NYT predicted in 1903 that it would take “one million to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine” (airplane). The wright brothers achieved the first powered airplane flight sixty-nine days later. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly
You might want to think about this.
A technological breakthrough could make Mars colonization feasible. It might even be possible for it to be self-sustaining. Who knows?
But an empire? That’s utterly ridiculous. You might as well say that the thing that the American empire will last eternally unless and until we genetically engineer a race of intelligent dragons who will replace it with a dragon empire, and if anyone expresses skepticism of that fantasy, you could just as easily point to “people didn’t think the Wright Brothers could fly.”
One wrong skeptic a hundred years ago doesn’t mean every fantasy is going to happen. There’s countless predictions that didn’t come true.
What’s your argument here? Why is it ridiculous?
Because earth has vastly better natural resources. It would be like trying to build an empire in Antarctica or the Sahara. At least those have air!
With Mars, the environment is completely inhospitable to humans, there’s no soil to grow food, no air to breathe, no nothing. To even set up a research station there would be a big achievement, to make that self-sustaining would be an incredible advancement. But you’re skipping the research station, skipping the colony, skipping the independent state, and going straight to empire without solving any of the problems in between. How are you even going to feed or provide oxygen to a Martian empire?
America was full of vast, untapped natural resources, and it still took nearly 200 years to become a superpower, after European powers devastated each other.
like i could go write a very long article here about how to do things, but i think that would miss the point. we’ll simply wait and see what happens, though i suspect it could take at least 100 years.
I guess I just don’t understand what possible advantage Mars has over places like the Sahara. And you don’t seem to think that an empire is going to suddenly manifest in the Sahara.
Mars is not at all that inhospitable as you seem to think. It has all the resources: sunlight, CO2, water. There’s really not much more needed. The reason why Mars is a desert today is because life just never happened to have developed there, but if it had, it would be as inhabited as any fertile land is.
Just food and air.
Fertile? Martian land is not fertile. It is incredibly barren. Even if you somehow solved the atmosphere problem, you couldn’t grow things there.
Only earth has the soil needed to grow things. Eons of things dying and being processed by worms has transformed wide swaths of the planet into fertile soil filled with nutrients that plants can draw on. Martian land has none of that. It’s just rock and dust. Even the Sahara is more hospitable.
Processing Martian soil to be even remotely “fertile” would be very energy intensive even if you brought it back to earth. “Terraforming” the soil on Mars at scale would require massive amounts of material from Earth. And then you have the problem that Martian gravity is too weak to retain a breathable atmosphere, even if you could magically conjure up a planet’s worth of air.
Even if all of these problems could be solved, Mars has no oil since oil is also derived from life. What does it have beyond “sunlight, CO2, water?” Earth has all of that and so much more, in abundance.
I’m sorry but you simply don’t understand geopolitics at all, nor the sheer scale of what you’re imagining.