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“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

wire-smith

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

graveexcitement

The sci-fi connection reminds me of The Expanse, a space opera set a few hundred years in the future, where humanity has spread out within the solar system but not beyond it. In The Expanse, Mars is one of the two major political powers of the solar system, and is quite prosperous; it is Earth's chief economic, political, and military rival. But Martians live underground or in domes, and a large part of its society/culture is focused around the terraforming effort (along with military service to stay vigilant against Earth), which has been ongoing for generations. Several books into the series, over a thousand new habitable worlds that at least somewhat overlap with Earth climates are discovered, and they're even within reach (<2 years' journey thanks to space portals).

One of the major plot ramifications of this is that Martians realize en masse, "Okay, so either I can stay here and continue the terraforming project, the fruits of which even my grandchildren will never get to see... or I can take my family to a planet that's already habitable and doesn't need to be terraformed," resulting in a huge exodus from Mars. If an already habitable world is an option, people would and should live there rather than spend an unfathomable amount of resources trying to terraform Mars. Thankfully, we already have one.

lgbtqiatext

ivysbea

gabby start: have you seen gabby pause

pink-whitefo

Happy pride to all the bi girls w bfs🏳️‍🌈

frivolousclown69

💋

stealingpotatoes

ok everyone hear me out,

stealingpotatoes

ok everyone hear me out,

fjjdnxjskakxnxnsjeifuchhs-deact

my favourite thing to do with my internet friends is pretend i don’t know what shit like “juice” is because it’s “just not a thing here”. so like, i love that kind of joke as much as the next girl, but what the fuck is a pep rally

fjjdnxjskakxnxnsjeifuchhs-deact

guys this wasn’t a girl who cried wolf bit of humour i legit haven’t the foggiest clue as to what a pep rally is

bellaswansong

its where everyone in the entire school goes into the gym and sits on the bleachers arranged by what grade youre in, and the band plays and the cheerleaders do a routine and then someone yells through a megaphone for ten minutes straight about how Our School Is The Best School And We Are Great

and then they pick the most Popular kids from each grade and do a Battle Of The Classes and basically see who can scream the loudest while the popular kids play tug of war or eat donuts off a string or something

fjjdnxjskakxnxnsjeifuchhs-deact

is american education just a cult that tens of millions of people are in on

autumngracy

Yes

iys-cloud

….. What.

ivysbea

tomboyhousewife-deactivated2024

queer people who have done zero self reflection when they see someone who doesn't look fem in their space

predatory-lesbians

ACTUALLY FUCKING THO

derinthescarletpescatarian

#the bioessentialism is gross and inescapable#‘oh i’m just not comfortable around this person bc i don’t know them!’#is that it? or is it that they’re masculine presenting and you only think of non-binary people as girl lite