Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.

A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

  • RGB3x3@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.

    Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.

    • 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social
      51·
      10 months ago

      You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?

      Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.

      The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:

      No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term

      I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.

      For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

      Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.worldEnglish
        21·
        10 months ago

        Jesus Christ you people really have no idea how space works, do you?

        The guy can’t just send up his own spacecraft anymore than Lockheed Martin and Raytheon can declare war on Russia.

        SpaceX sells spacecraft to NASA for them to use in the same way LM sells F-18’s to the Navy for them to use. At no point in time does Elon just get to unilaterally send civilians to Mars even if Starship was fully capable.

        Everything SpaceX craft do in space is under the charter and dictation of NASA, and at the current point in time, exclusively for government/military missions. Not his own flights of fancy.