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Going to mars is pointless and retarded
| queensbridge benzo | 02/24/26 |
| Nazca Redlines | 02/24/26 |
Poast new message in this thread
Date: February 24th, 2026 2:45 PM Author: queensbridge benzo Child labour on Mars – is this the future that Elon Musk wants? The colonisation of Mars has long been a human dream. But as Scott Solomon explains in Becoming Martian, it would be a hellish project
Gift this article free Add us as preferred source Two astronauts train for future Mars missions in the southern Israeli desert in 2021 Astronauts in training for future missions on Mars – what writer Scott Solomon describes as ‘a hostile, dead planet’ Credit: Jack Guez/AFP Brendan Gillott 16 February 2026 7:15am GMT A few years ago, when I was living in north Cambridge, I was canvassed by a cheerful, smartly dressed man running for the city council. He represented the Libertarian Party of the United Kingdom. One of his more eye-catching ideas was that the city should abolish council tax and make up the shortfall through asteroid mining. Autonomous space vehicles would head out to the asteroid belt, snatch up as much gold and platinum and nickel and iron as they could carry, and ferry it back to East Anglia. Sure, this would be difficult. But Cambridge, he reasoned, was full of clever and ingenious people. What could stop us? What indeed. Space, and the distant worlds that populate it, have long offered a rich seam of hope and delusion to the Earth-bound imagination. As the biologist Scott Solomon observes in Becoming Martian, of nowhere has this been more true than Mars. Whether as a source of danger (HG Wells’s War of the Worlds), of fascination (the alien “canals” that 19th-century astronomers thought they spied on the surface), or grand designs (the marketing bumf of SpaceX), Mars has long been proposed as the most Earth-like and most hospitable of our solar neighbours. The one thing we don’t want to hear, it would seem, is the truth. Mars, Solomon writes, is “a hostile, dead planet”. Scott Solomon In Becoming Martian, author Scott Solomon discusses how future migrations into space will change our bodies and minds Becoming Martian asks: what would be the medical, psychological and evolutionary consequences of attempting to colonise Mars? The difficulties would begin long before we reached the red planet. Space is an infinite death zone, almost perfectly inimical to terrestrial life. Solomon provides a catalogue of ways in which it tries to kill us: unprotected by Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere, space travellers are exposed to huge levels of radiation, raising the risk of cancers and permanent genetic damage. Living in zero gravity degrades muscle mass and tone, redistributes fluids in the body in odd ways, damages eyesight, drains the body of blood cells, and makes everyday activities like sleeping or eating suddenly arduous. It certainly isn’t impossible to send people to Mars. The Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days in space aboard the Mir station, and returned home largely unscathed. (He was, however, two-and-a-half inches taller than when he left Earth: another weird effect of the zero-G lifestyle.) How long it would take to reach Mars depends on the technology available, but even with what we have, the journey would be much quicker than Polyakov’s stint. Still, a colonisation mission would involve some extraordinary mental challenges: you would be sailing for months (at least) in a cramped tub, probably in close proximity to many other people, separated from the void by just a few inches of fragile and sensitive metal. Upon arrival, you would find that recovery from space flight is a gruelling experience, which takes a long time even on Earth. Solomon notes that for contemporary astronauts, a week of recovery for every week in space is “a good rule of thumb”. Mars would offer little respite. Wheel tracks left by the Nasa's Perseverance Rover on Mars's surface in 2021 Wheel tracks left by the Nasa’s Perseverance Rover in the dust and crushed rock that cover Mars’s surface Credit: Nasa/AFP/Getty In fact, things would only get worse. There’s no breathable air on Mars. What water might be found is frozen, difficult to access and possibly contaminated. There’s practically no atmosphere and zero magnetosphere, since Mars is geologically dead, so radiation and solar flares would pose lethal risks. There’s no soil, either, only a layer of dust and crushed rock known as “regolith”. Thus, most edible plants would fail to grow and anything that did would probably be rendered poisonous by the chemicals in the barren ground. As if that weren’t enough, the planet is punishingly cold, boasting average temperatures that make Antarctica seem toasty. Some have proposed “terraforming” these issues away: modifying the climate of Mars through some gigantic application of technology (real or imagined). Solomon is sceptical. Given that lack of soil, and therefore flora, it would be almost impossible to create enough oxygen to flood the Martian air and support human respiration. And even if you could, Mars’s low gravity and resultant low air-pressure would ensure that your attempts were wasted: the oxygen would promptly be siphoned off into space. Elon Musk, SpaceX owner, at a Berlin awards ceremony in 2020 Elon Musk with his SpaceX project paints a picture of technology being used in space to achieve material abundance and multi-planetary civilisation Credit: Getty Europe As a result, any human inhabitants of Mars would probably have to live as if they were still in deep space. One possibility is that settlements could be built under great domes – think the Eden Project in Cornwall – where ersatz ecosystems could, with painful difficulty, be maintained. Another, Solomon suggests, is that prospective Martians could look forward to a lifetime cooped up underground. Either way, their existence would be spartan, restrained and always on the edge of disaster. Diets would be restrictive, based on a carefully pre-selected set of plants and microbes – but probably not animals – brought from Earth. Children would have to work from a young age to keep the colony functional. There’s no real terrestrial analogue for these environments. Quite plausibly, everyone would just go mad. All of this finally brings us to Solomon’s personal interest: the evolutionary pressures that a Martian population would experience. It’s not clear, he argues, whether human beings could reproduce in these conditions. High radiation and low gravity are unlikely to be conducive to pregnancy, and even if it were possible for us to have children in such a scenario, their bones would be worryingly underdeveloped. All births would have to occur via caesarean section, leading Solomon to the curious thought that, since human skull size is limited by the width of the birth canal, in the long term, Martian children might develop gigantic heads. Inbreeding, given the plausible size of any colony, might prove a further issue. Still from Mars Attacks! film (1996) Soloman says the conditions on the red planet could ultimately result in any children born there developing gigantic heads, not dissimilar to the Martians depicted in the film Mars Attacks! (1996) Credit: AJ Pics/Alamy Worse still, anyone born into such a world would be stuck there. Unaccustomed to the higher gravity of Earth and the bevy of diseases and micro-organisms that swarm our planet, any future Martians would in effect be “bubble boys”, as Solomon humorously terms them, unsuited to anywhere but their red and distant redoubt. Solomon proposes that future gene-editing technologies might ameliorate some of this, but the ethical issues this would pose are fearsome (and not as well covered in Becoming Martian as they might have been). The ultimate outcome of such a project, replicated elsewhere in space, would be the production of “cosmic islands”: planets populated by peoples with a shared ancestry but divergent genetics. As with Darwin’s finches, separation would cause speciation. “At some point,” Solomon writes, “people may have to choose whether to prioritise adaptation for life on other planets or the ability to maintain human beings as one single species. It might not be possible to achieve both.”
Becoming Martian is clearly the work of a space nerd, and Solomon treats his topic with tangible enthusiasm, bordering on glee. But, in the end, that isn’t enough for him. In his judgment, which he saves for the conclusion, “there are still too many unknowns” for manned space colonisation to make sense. “For now,” he writes, “I’m content to remain here along with my fellow humans on the planet of our ancestors.” I put down his book feeling much the same way. There’s plenty that we can still achieve, out in the solar system, using autonomous probes, telescopes and rovers. Sending out teams of humans won’t add much except unnecessary danger and moral hazard. Elon Musk may paint a pretty picture of material abundance and multi-planetary civilisation; but, on balance, my libertarian door-knocker was more sensible. Becoming Martian is published by MIT at £27. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books The best of books The 20 best novels of all time The literary tradition would look very different without these novels. Each has moved the form forwards, changing the way we think Share Save Join the conversation
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Date: February 24th, 2026 2:49 PM Author: Nazca Redlines Didn't ready any of that lengthy screed beyond the thread title. But, as far as the thread title goes: The opposite is true. Most of what we're doing on earth is pointless. Another cape hero movie. More fake number go up value for shareholders. Arguing about politics.
Going to Mars is pushing the boundaries of human exploration, achievement, and ingenuity. It would be one of the most worthwhile things we as a society do. |