this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
983 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
71585 readers
5233 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What the F is every corporation's boner with rockets? π
Reusable rockets, in particular.
Imagine having a reusable car in a world where they were all disposable.
Because the last stage of existence on this planet. Will be febel plans to try and colonize other planets. Because our planet will start to poison us as a defensive mechanism. All of these Corporations need a plan to get off planet.
Imo it's a good thing tho. Spreading our civilization across multiple planets is the only way to guarantee long long term success. Obviously we should also fix the climate change issue (and many others). But still, being spread across the solar system would give our species redundancy. An extinction event on earth like a large meteor strike would no longer be the end.
While what you said is true,
i guess that most people's motivation is rather the economic benefits. Think of it this way:
The 1960s space race created jobs all across the US and inspired a generation of scientists.
Mars settlement could do the same, but bigger. At least that's the idea.
It would take a lot to make Mars more habitable than Earth. This isn't about colonisation this is simply that it's cool to build rockets.
Yeah, it's easier to terraform ... Planet Earth!
It's the only planet we can terraform (As in repairing some of the damage we've done), we are nowhere near able to terraform Mars, not even theoretically and disregarding cost.
Maybe in a century we can. But only maybe.
Hypothetically, we could terraform Venus. At the very least, it shares a lot of the issues that we're trying to fix on Earth, just dialled up to 11 - its main problems are that it's way too hot, the atmosphere has way too much carbon in it (96.5% vs Earth's 0.04%), and the atmosphere has way too much sulfur (0.015% vs Earth's 0.00000002%, making the atmosphere highly acidic). So if for example scientists had an idea for causing a chain reaction in a planetary atmosphere that rapidly sequestered all atmospheric carbon but were worried about unknown strength or side effects, instead of testing it on Earth where it could kill us all, they could test it on Venus where any failures would have no serious consequences. And if it worked, not only would it mean that we fix climate change on Earth but we partially terraform Venus into the bargain.
Venus has roughly similar gravity to Earth and has a ferrous core which could hypothetically be turned molten (and therefore ferromagnetic) to provide the same kind of magnetosphere that Earth's core does. Mars has neither of these things and would therefore never be able to sustain human life naturally - Venus potentially could. On Mars, the atmosphere is just one of many obstacles. On Venus it's THE obstacle. Solve the atmosphere, you solve Venus.
Mars is the best option we have, which is why I mentioned that. Venus already has selfenforcing runaway global warming, and we can't even land a probe there, because the environment is extremely hostile.
Mars is by far the easier option.
Feeble? But I think you meant futile? Idk.
Yes, let spend money to fuck up other planets as well instead of saving this one. /s
Thatβs exactly what they will say.
The planet isn't doing anything, we are poisoning ourselves. Or as lemmy puts it "big evil corporations (which we support everyday because it's cheaper than buying local/sustainable) are poisoning us".