This blog post from a NY Times contributor made the rounds a few weeks ago. I noticed it because John Carmack responded to it on twatter, and I recently wrote about him. I considered not writing about it, but the problem is that only Elon “slap me again Daddy ADL” Musk fanboys were the only ones responding, and I needed to say my piece.
The goal of this essay is to persuade you that we shouldn’t send human beings to Mars, at least not anytime soon. Landing on Mars with existing technology would be a destructive, wasteful stunt whose only legacy would be to ruin the greatest natural history experiment in the Solar System. It would no more open a new era of spaceflight than a Phoenician sailor crossing the Atlantic in 500 B.C. would have opened up the New World. And it wouldn’t even be that much fun.
Au contraire you intolerable faggot, it would be very fun.
I have never seen someone miss the point of something more than I see this fag miss the point of landing a man on Mars. The purpose of prestige projects is prestige. The purpose of civilizational projects is civilization. Why did we land a man on the Moon? Well according to this fag, it was to do experiments on moon rocks. In reality it was to land a man on the moon and then drive a car around for a while, and that’s fantastic.
Maciej Ceglowski, author of that piece.
We don’t need to justify a manned mission to Mars. People need to justify why we have not already done a manned mission to Mars.
Sticking a flag in the Martian dust would cost something north of half a trillion dollars [1], with no realistic prospect of landing before 2050 [2]. To borrow a quote from John Young, keeping such a program funded through fifteen consecutive Congresses would require a series “of continuous miracles, interspersed with acts of God”. [3] Like the Space Shuttle and Space Station before it, the Mars program would exist in a state of permanent redesign by budget committee until any logic or sense in the original proposal had been wrung out of it.
Half a trillion dollars. Not per year, but in total, over the course of more than twenty five years. That works out to $20 billion per year. For some insane reason this little soyfag throws out that number as if it’s a serious argument against going to Mars. Now that I know how cheap it is I’m enraged that we didn’t do this decades ago.
Author Maciej Ceglowski
And for the record, I’m not even sure where he gets the half a trillion dollar number and others have seriously questioned that figure. The Mars rover’s entire mission, including the fifteen years it was active, cost just a touch over one billion dollars. But let’s just assume that a manned mission to Mars will cost five hundred times that.
Good. Do it faggot. I want my Mars colony, and I want it now.
When the great moment finally came, and the astronauts had taken their first Martian selfie, strict mission rules meant to prevent contamination and minimize risk would leave the crew dependent on the same robots they’d been sent at enormous cost to replace.
Mars Polar Sand Dunes photographed with HiRise.
Xir also pretends that we absolutely cannot justify potentially introducing bacterial contaminates into the Martian soil. Now, to steelman this argument, I’ll grant him a small concession. Yes, it’s very reasonable to believe there is a small probability of life on Mars. We’ve discovered bacteria pretty much every place we’ve looked for them on Earth, and the same could well be true on Mars. As a result, sending a bunch of robots to Mars ahead of people makes a lot of sense. Having said that, you could make the exact same argument against sending people to the moon.
Sure, there’s no reason to expect water on the moon, but it’s possible that some microbes don’t need water, or maybe some is buried under the Moon’s surface. If we’re going to play this game we can’t send robots to Mars either, since they could also have bacterial contamination. After all, they can live on the outside of the space station for at least three years, well short of the trip to Mars.
But besides that, it’s not an either or, we can do both.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when going to Mars made sense, back when astronauts were a cheap and lightweight alternative to costly machinery, and the main concern about finding life on Mars was whether all the trophy pelts could fit in the spacecraft. No one had been in space long enough to discover the degenerative effects of freefall, and it was widely accepted that not just exploration missions, but complicated instruments like space telescopes and weather satellites, were going to need a permanent crew.
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If the head of NOAA Ocean Exploration (budget: $25 million) or the U.S. Antarctic Program ($350 million) held a press conference announcing a plan to fulfill human destiny, they’d be carrying their belongings home in a cardboard box before sundown. But our space agency is held to a lower standard.
Again, you can’t replace people with machines, since the entire purpose is to put a man on Mars. That’s like saying that we can’t have Olympic events, since cars go faster. It’s just fundamentally missing the point.
And our space agency isn’t held to a lower standard than our Ocean Exploration agency because of it’s role in facilitating civilizational dreams. That means that it’s held to a higher standard, or at least should be. Arguing otherwise is enraging pseudo-intellectual snark.
Manned space exploration is a prestige project, and that’s a good thing. The real problem is that NASA has turned into nothing more than a sinecure that doesn’t do manned space travel.
But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude, while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972).
The imbalance between human and robot is so overwhelming that, despite the presence of a $250 billion International Space Station National Laboratory, every major discovery made in space this century has come from robotic spacecraft. In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it’s not going to get any work done.
The bugcreature almost gets this one right, but then slips on a banana, trips, falls, and shits his pants on the landing. The International Space Station has probably contributed a good deal of relatively mundane practical knowledge about how to keep people alive in space. That this is more systems engineering than science does not make it less valuable information than the James Webb Telescope’s studying of galaxies at high redshift.
Unmanned systems tend to be superior at scientific discoveries compared to manned systems. That’s why we don’t shove a guy onto our space telescopes, and no one is saying that NASA shouldn’t launch an order of magnitude more unmanned systems into space than manned systems. But manned systems are better at helping us understand what makes manned systems work, and that is an entirely different type of knowledge that this bugcreature simply dismisses out of hand.
The images that the JWST bring us provide nothing of objective value, but we subjectively value the scientific knowledge it brings us, even though that knowledge has little practical value. We can also value the knowledge that realistic testing of human support systems in space brings us. He simply presumes, without explanation, that this has no value.
All this would be fine if it was just talk. But NASA spent more on their Moon and Mars programs in 2022 than the total budget of the National Science Foundation. And in 2024, they plan to start launching pieces of a new space station, the Gateway, which by the laws of orbital bureaucracy will lock us in to decades of having to invent reasons to go visit the thing.
Somehow we’ve embarked on the biggest project in history even though it has no articulable purpose, offers no benefits, and will cost taxpayers more than a good-sized war. Even the builders of the Great Pyramid at Giza could at least explain what it was for. And yet this project has sailed through an otherwise gridlocked system with the effortlessness of a Pentagon budget. Presidents of both parties now make landing on Mars an official goal of US space policy. Even billionaires who made their fortune automating labor on Earth agree that Mars must be artisanally explored by hand.
The whole thing is getting weird.
I don’t want to get sucked into defending NASA, but putting a man on Mars has a clear and obvious articulable purpose. The purpose is to put a man on Mars. If you don’t get this, you’re an intolerable little bugcreature who ought to be shoved into an oven.
The faggot ends his piece taking shots at Elon Musk. He also takes shots at Amtrak. This annoys me, since I only want cool people taking shots at Elon Musk and Amtrak. Luckily, some Musk fanboys got wind of this article and started making annoying arguments in favour of their favourite LOLcow.
Most of the lengthy post justifies itself in criticizing use of taxpayers’ money by Nasa in its long-term ambition of going to Mars. But in his conclusion, he is also telling entrepreneurs what they should not do with their own money.
We shouldn’t be telling billionaires what to do with the money they parasitized off of the backs of the people, because we should have already killed all of them.
I find that approach a little dishonest, especially when the money represents wealth created by the owner, as is the case of Musk.
No, Elon Musk did not create billions in wealth, that’s too laughable to even respond to.
His space and more earthbound efforts are not based on marketplace speculation, but all involve making rockets, cars and other equipment that would not otherwise have existed. How he and his associates (such as (((Jared Isaacman)))) choose to use that wealth is mostly their own choice, not that of a commentator.
(((Jared Isaacman)))
Activities so far include everything from the Falcon Heavy test payload of a spacegoing car… to Inspiration-4. Some future activities will doubtless be successful and others failures. Who is Ceglowski to judge which among these “we” should attempt?
Better question: Who the fuck is dumb faggot Elon Musk to decide how our societies capital will be spent?
I am so fucking sick and tired of capitalist arguments. There’s no such thing as earning a billion, let alone a quarter of a trillion. Elon Musk did not create hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth. He’s a parasite with a rich daddy, who became the darling of our (((Democracy Class))) because he used to be able to pretend that he was the real life Tony Stark.
Then he bought twatter, and revealed himself as the idiotic manchild he truly was – assuming his hyperloop and nuke Mars bullshit didn’t already – and he’s left with an internet defense force consisting of the same people who would be outraged, just outraged at how mean the LiBUrAl MeDiA was to brave patriot George W. Bush.
This faggot should be allowed to make decisions as to what he eats for breakfast. Everything else should be put up to a vote from the public. There is no reason why we can’t have a system set up where scientific projects are proposed, and then voted on directly by the people with an internet based voting system.
Instead, we have our parasitical NASA faggots essentially doing nothing of value for twenty billion per year, when this faggot himself admitted that a manned Mars mission would cost only half a trillion over twenty five years. That’s so cheap that Canada could do it, let alone the country that just sent many hundreds of billions to Ukraine, and six trillion to big businesses at the start of Covid-19.
But rather than a system that puts the power to decide these things in the hands of the people, we get finkled faggots online bloviating about how Elon “daddy owned a diamond mine” Musk “created” hundreds of billions in wealth. Therefore, we should all rally behind this fraud and get really excited about his poorly thought out “plan” to get diversity to Mars or whatever.
One last blurb from Maciej Ceglowski.
One path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human space flight would be enough to staff up the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history.
NASA spends $11.6 billion per year on manned spaceflight, only about four billion of which is for the ISS. The rest is for the Moon to Mars stuff, which makes zero sense since they aren’t building anything. Rather than take the logical view that NASA is a parasitical institution, this faggot simply proclaims that they could use that money to launch a bunch of spaceprobes. This would then lead to many new space discoveries.
That last part is undoubtedly true. But if you cancelled NASA’s fake Mars landing budget they’d just steal that money on behalf of something else.
The theft of our space ambitions is one of the most underreported and enraging aspects of zionist occupation. We have to pay for parasite “refugees” to live in fancy hotels and foreign wars for Schlomo. There’s just no money for the relatively cheap projects that would advance our civilization forward.
Since mars is an island off the coast of canada complete with no-fly zone, I’m all for more manned space exploration.
Kubrick’s space program sucked (all the original tapes are “lost” by NASS-holes (george carlin) since it wasn’t important and had no historical value.
We can do a much better job and I wanta see more walrus bones, Lemmings, eagles and more exact photos of egyptian deserts photoshopped by 8 yr olds who know how to add a red filter.
The bugcreature claims if Phoenicians had crossed the Atlantic in 500 bc it wouldn’t have opened up a new world to them, but it literally would have.
Also whipsnade, all of that “moon landing was faked bullshit” is just commie anti-American propaganda attempting to get qanon tier Americans to deny themselves and their nation one of its greatest ever accomplishments.
The anti space exploration people never take into account all the technologies developed in order to land a man on the moon. These are technologies we now use in everyday life, like lasers which now have very far reaching applications.