Is getting humans to Mars the most important Human Endeavour of our Times?

Is getting humans to Mars the most important Human Endeavour of our Times?


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Aiken_Drumn

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I think it is.

Think of all the human advancement in tech and material science.

Think about Bezos and Musk spunking their money into progress!

AND IF NOT

What is?
 
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Bruh 5 people own more than 4 billion people and y'all can't wait to get to Mars? we're fudging this planet up and you want to just leave and set up shop somewhere else with a handful of rich people?
 
Your poll lacks "This could hurt Downtown politically."

Serious answer: I think it's one of the most important human endeavors. THE most important? No. Curing cancer tops my list of most important human endeavors. Curing some other stuff comes in at #2.

Going to Mars comes in somewhere in my top 10, though. As I said to one of the constant nay-sayers on CBC.ca recently when it was reported that a Canadian astronaut will be among those going to the Moon (in orbit, not actually landing), the spinoff tech we've gained from the space program has resulted in all sorts of things we take for granted but never had before.

The reason I can still see, rather than being blind, is due to tech gained from the space program. The reason we can all post here and talk over things like Zoom is due to the space program. Satellites don't jump into orbit by themselves, after all.
 
the tech to safely establish human beings on mars would be very, very useful because of what it implies we'd also be capable of here on earth. the number of engineering and scientific challenges to doing that are not trivial, to put it mildly. thus, if we are advanced enough to solve those we are advanced enough to address a hell of a lot of scarcity here too. in terms of energy production, medicine, food production etc if we could cost-feasibly scale up to mars colony levels, the standard of living on earth would probably be amazing. might as well solve global warming by just having less sunlight via dyson swarms at that point, why not?

i don't see why mars should get special emphasis, or why sending people/colonizing there has particular benefit over alternatives though. and it's probably worth applying the relevant advancements on earth as a priority.

i suppose it also depends on what you mean by "our times". if you mean "the existence of humanity as a whole", at some point in the very distant future we will either leave earth or get roasted trying, in a literal sense. i don't think humans will look too much like they do now by then, but who knows.
 
[Verse 1]
Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right
But when asked about something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

[Chorus]
You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye)
In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high)
Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay)
You'll get pie in the sky when you die (That's a lie!)

[Verse 4]
Working folk of all countries unite
Side by side we for freedom will fight
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

[Chorus]
You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye)
When you've learned how to cook and how to fry (and bake a pie!)
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye (That's no lie!)
 
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Mars is just a big hot rock with nothing on it.

Oh? :huh:

The Rovers would disagree with you (the probes, not the musicians).

That said... I've been working on a Mars filk, based on "The Gypsy Rover". I haven't gotten very far, though, since there aren't any green woods on Mars.
 
My suspicion is that in the future history, this century might have been the chance to go to Mars. That part is hard to tell, we might live in a world where there is ongoing industrial progress, to the point where it'll eventually happen. Or, we might be at the beginning of the spiral down where we lose capacity faster than we can rebuild it elsewhere. I would chalk it up in the same category as to whether we even survive the upcoming existential crisis. If we do, then having become multiplanetary will have been a significant forking point in our history.
 
From a very cursory knowledge about current relevant tech (rocket cost/speed, window to land on Mars every couple of years, non-existent hydroponics for months let alone years etc), no, we are nowhere near colonizing Mars.
You are talking about a species that barely maintains a space station with fewer than 15 people, orbiting a little over the atmosphere (or within it, if the exosphere is identified as part of Earth's atmosphere). Our tech is simply not advanced enough for space colonization.
Moreover, we have more than enough critical issues with life on earth. If we can't even make it here, starting with optimal conditions, imagine what would happen on Mars.
 
I do find it funny how we put dilemmas into buckets from which we judge their budgets.

I'm not sure it's the budget that's the problem, I think we spend more on many other things, none of which we will voluntarily give up to help other people.

"We have people here" has been the refrain from long before Bezos. Er, long before he mattered.

Now, other times these dilemmas are brought up, we usually point out that we can do two things at once. Even then, it's usually better to hire people to do things they're really good at. Bonus points for synergy, obviously.



Of course, we always value our dreams more than other people's.
 
That budget itself would very glaringly kill any idea of realistic colonization of Mars, does not mean the actual tech is there to allow it. Both are lacking.
While you would die from lack of air due to no hydroponics (emulated closed system) by now having worked even on isolated parts of Earth, for more than a few months, you would also die from lack of constant supply of food and water, which would be due to cost.
Check the price for bringing food to the space station, which when compared to the distance to Mars is essentially almost on Earth, and then extrapolate what the cost would be for food for any reasonable number of people on Mars (I doubt you propose 10 people being on Mars, like in the Space station, but even 10 people would be too costly).

Dreams are fine, but they should at least have some chance of working out. Otherwise it is cheap fantasy - or a scam.
 
That said: looking at my spending, I don't implicitly find the colonization of Mars to be valuable. I don't even give Bezos money for the privilege of streaming his selection of entertainment.

Outside of actually preventing existential threats, I think ending desperate poverty is a vital need, and could be a real pivot point in history. In the more developed nations, actually cracking the various mental illnesses would prevent a lot of pain. I'm not sure you'd see that on future graphs, but a step change in medical progress would definitely create something new, and I put a lot of my personal effort into that. Of course, I think that there's a lot of synergy between all four categories, so honestly I appreciate people's sincere efforts on any of them, as they prefer
 
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