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Here's an awesome place where we are not going. Mars. Read on to find out why. |
If you've been following the news lately (which I do not recommend), you might have missed Elon Musk quietly announcing (for him it was like he was whispering in church) that his company SpaceX no longer plans to go to Mars.
Musk began talking about his plan to colonize Mars back in 2001. He launched SpaceX in 2002, with a hare-brained scheme to use Russian rockets to send a greenhouse to Mars, an idea he called "Mars-Oasis."
I'm dead.
Elon Musk must be the most successful con artist in human history. Good on him.
In 2011, he announced he would send a human to Mars within ten or twelve years.
In 2016, he said it would be more like 2024.
In 2018, he launched an unoccupied Tesla Roadster into orbit past Mars, which is a fun way to make more space junk, and space junk is something we need.
For more than two decades, deadlines came and went, and Elon Musk steadfastly did not send anyone, or so much as an unmanned rocket, to Mars.
So... yeah. Musk isn't going to Mars. Now he's going to the moon instead. He's going to build a city there.
Hmmm. Maybe he will.
More likely, twenty years and billions in funding from now, he'll dial back his plans and tell us he's going to Staten Island.
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Tesla Roadster flying around in space. No, it's not a real astronaut driving it. |
What's a LARP?
Thee Optimist is nothing if not right up to the minute.
The word LARP comes from a more analog era. Technically, a LARP is a "live action role playing" game, like Dungeons and Dragons, say, except people dress up in real life (with swords and helmets and period costumes), and pretend the fantasy is actually happening.
In modern slang that the hip kids use, a LARP is when you pretend you're something that you're not, or you pretend a thing is something that it isn't.
Examples? Sure.
For two decades, Elon Musk LARPed as someone who could, and soon would, send people to Mars.
Western civilization LARPs as a meritocracy, when in fact the people at the top are mostly degenerates, morons, and one-trick ponies.
In recent decades, members of the degenerate ruling class were the ones most responsible for pushing the idea that space travel was right around the corner.
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An image of French commoners parading the decapitated heads of aristocrats on pikes during the French Revolution, specifically during the Reign of Terror. This sort of thing comes around once in a while, when people have had enough. |
Why Can't We Travel in Space?
Right. Good question. Thanks for asking.
We've been doing this whole space travel LARP for a long time - Soviet and American scientists were fascinated by the idea at least by the 1950s.
If you really chew on it, and strip away all the hype, not much has happened since then.
It seems like maybe we sent some people to the moon. The Soviets definitely sent a bunch of unmanned ships to Venus - and discovered that it was a very inhospitable place, nowhere we want to go.
We sent robots to Mars, which has been a spectacular success. And we sent the unmanned ships Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 into deep space nearly half a century ago. Incredibly, they still work, and Voyager 1 is the most distant man-made object from Earth, almost 16 million miles away.
But there are no people on those ships.
Although we probably won't put the fantasy of human space travel to rest anytime soon, it might be good to try.
Reason 1 - Everything is too far away.
The distances in space are immense. With current technology, Mars is a seven- to ten-month journey, one way.
At one point, SpaceX estimated they could cut that time to six months, but then SpaceX also...
Yes.
In addition, Earth and Mars only come into alignment every 26 months, so if an intrepid crew of fearless space travelers actually arrived on Mars, they would then have to wait a little over two years there before returning to Earth.
A quick round-trip to Mars is therefore probably a three-and-a-half year ordeal.
But forget about Mars (Elon did).
Let's think big. Let's go to the nearest star system, Proxima Centauri, a mere 4.25 light year trip. That's 50 trillion miles. At current speeds, it would take around half a million years just to get there.
Human civilization has only been around 10,000 years or so, and we're already in a whale of a mess. I don't know if we have 500,000 years left.
Anyway, I don't want to be stuck on a spaceship that long.
Reason 2 - We don't have the technology, nor are we likely to develop it.
Remember our intrepid Mars crew?
Assuming they arrived there alive (a large assumption), now they're stuck for two years.
Mars is a climate that is hostile to life as we understand it. The crew would have to find some way to grow food and make drinkable water - things that are abundant here on Earth, but don't exist on Mars.
They would need to carry (or generate) enough oxygen to keep the crew alive more or less indefinitely. They would need to have some method to build a shelter in which to live.
Generations have passed while people ponder a trip to Mars, and none of these technologies have been developed in any realistic way.
Remember our trip to Proxima Centauri? Traveling there would require more energy than the human race has produced during its entire existence up to now.
Reason 3 - Space is Hostile to Humans.
Human beings have spent the past two million years evolving and adapting to life on Earth.
In space, the lack of gravity quickly leads to muscle atrophy (30% to 40% in two months). It also leads to rapid bone density loss, in the range of 1% to 2% per month.
If our Mars crew ever made it home, after three years, you or I could probably crush their bones to dust with our bare hands.
During their trip, our Mars crew would have been exposed to hundreds of times as much radiation as the people who stayed home. The atmosphere on Earth protects us from radiation.
As mentioned earlier, there's no food, water, or oxygen on other planets, as far as we know.
Moreover, a human being in space not wearing a space suit would quickly die of asphyxiation.
The artificial environments that we build (on the International Space Station, for example), would have to be replicated and built to foresee and withstand any possible accident, with multiple redundancies in every system, this time far away.
We are nowhere close to developing anything like this, though I feel certain we will keep talking about it.
Maybe we should talk about how to live better on Earth.
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ICE agent from a previous post, kicked into deep space. |
Words of Wisdom
"I urge everyone to treat every day of the year as Earth Day. Planet Earth is the only home we shall ever know, yet we are relentlessly harming it."
- Jane Goodall