Friday, July 07, 2017

Spacey Pipe Dreams.




I see once again news of the fact that the entire surface of Mars is not just dry, not only only barren, not merely bombarded with radiation, but also completely and utterly poisonous to life.

Enough with the fantasies and insanity that humans will go out into space and to alien worlds to live.

Colonization of other planets and points in deep space are nice ideas, but that's all they are. Getting there and creating a living environment is prohibitively expensive now and always will be. You cannot reduce the toxicity of a planet's entire surface. Humans did not evolve to live in zero G or even low G environments. We would die in either. The litany of dangers to colonizing space and planets with environments completely inimical to life is a sad pipe dream fit only for fiction. All very nice, but it ain't gonna happen. Not now. Not fifty years from now. Not ever.

We can't even stop ourselves from poisoning the planet that gave birth to us. How are we supposed to make a home out of locations that want only to destroy not just us, but Life itself? We aren't supposed to, and we can't do so.

What we need to do is forget about our greed, collectively reduce the human population in a sane manner, and stop consuming the planet that is the only place in the Universe where we are safe and relatively secure.


We're not going anywhere. Humans haven't even been beyond low Earth orbit in many decades; and we aren't going anywhere like that ever again. It's not just that it's too expensive, it's also that the world's collective wealth has been transferred from governments to individuals; and those richies ain't going to give any of it up.

So stop sucking on that pipe filled with opium dreams.

Mars. A dead planet. Dead in every way. You can't fix it. You can't live on it. Forget about it. It ain't gonna happen.

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