Tom Ritchford
1 min readJan 11, 2024

--

You don't provide any arguments, facts, logic or reasoning. Did you forget to finish your comment?

Setting up a self-sustaining Mars colony would be incredibly expensive - quadrillions of dollars, if not more, and many decades, if not centuries.

And what would we get for that incredibly huge investment? A freezing cold, dark, arid, lifeless, airless, poisonous, radioactive desert that is far less hospitable than even the most awful places on Earth. Why would anyone do that to themselves, or to their children?

And even if we wanted to, the costs would be such that only a tiny fraction of humanity would ever leave the Earth, at least for the first thousand years or so.

(Disagree with me? Show your work. How long before we send 80 million people a year, the number of new humans every year, to off-world colonies?)

However, we have an immediate crisis: we are destroying our environment. For a tiny, tiny fraction of the money it would take to colonize Mars, we could stabilize the one ecosystem we know exists.

"to judge for the other individuals"

Individuals are free to go to Mars if they like - no one's stopping you.

Oh, you want trillions of our tax dollars to do this, do you? Well, then we do get to judge.

--

--

Responses (1)