This is the future humanity is going to experience, the colonization of Mars.
There will be a first 100 colonists. Then robotic constructor robots. Digging habitats, purifying water, refining materials, doming cities, seeding lichen.
There will be environmental protests against terraforming, they'll get overwhelmed by economic interests. Booming corporate mining towns and independent free cities connected by high speed vacuum tube rail. Advanced gene therapies achieving longevity escape velocity.
It's crazy but it's all going to happen, its now inevitable. The greatest infrastructure buildout in history will compete to industrialize the high frontier of space and enable a genuine Martian colonization program. And it will occur at the same time as humanity masters its own biology.
There are people alive today who will live to see a breathable atmosphere on Mars.
Peter is not correct about me in this case.
I have always known that dangers from Earth will also pose dangers to Mars. Obviously so. However, the immense difficulty of traveling to Mars means that there is a much higher likelihood of mitigating risks originating from Earth.
A clear example of major risk reduction would be a deadly pandemic. Since it takes 6 months to reach Mars, there is an automatic 6 month quarantine!
Even traveling at the speed of light, a deadly computer virus or AI attack can potentially be stopped due to Mars being ~4 to ~20 light-minutes from Earth.
This doesn’t mean that a Mars civilization eliminates all risk, but it absolutely greatly reduces the risk of consciousness being extinguished.
Moreover, Mars is a stepping stone to extending consciousness broadly within our solar system and ultimately to millions of stars within our galaxy, which would extend the probable lifespan of consciousness as we know it by many orders of magnitude.
That said, what I personally find most motivating is not the risk reduction aspect of extending life beyond Earth, but rather the inspiring nature of exploration and being out there among the stars!
Perhaps we will meet aliens or find the remains of long-dead civilizations that lasted millions of years …
"a new era in space exploration where we're gonna go to the moon. We're gonna have have a base on the moon. We're gonna have send people to Mars. Have and and make life multilanetary. And I think this day heralds a new age of space exploration."
Elon Musk
@NielsHoven Really milking this for attention 😂🔥
Great book. My oldest loves it for the pictures and learning the names in her languages. Gonna start to use it for its original purpose at some point
@fattygustave@PunterJeff They want STRC to be 10x backed by their Bitcoin. Add in the other instruments. Back of the napkin math: their Bitcoin stack would need to be several trillion. Now, multiply it by the mnav. That would be 10 trillion. Very roughly 100x from here
I befriended a woman in her 60s recently and she told me that over 30 years ago she found her 3 month old dead in his crib in the morning, the day after a round of vaccines. When she told the doctor who was investigating his case that he had been running a fever from the vaccines, she was dismissed immediately as it was “not related”.
The only way we make it out into the solar system
Is to make sure the forces of capitalism are driving our exploration, not government budgets
Starlink surpassing NASA's budget over the next few years is a phenomenal step in that direction