[crush-n-spread]

We need to dream big while we commit to solving the problems spaceflight poses to human health.

Whether or not NASA has the right amount of funding is not going to make or break this; instead, we need to lower the cost of spaceflight and start sending more stuff and more people up there. With the cost of going to space lowered one hundred times, suddenly NASA's current budget becomes quite sufficient.

This article is one man's emotional retelling of his first days on Earth after a year in LEO (he's trying to sell his book). In contrast, a trip to Mars is only three months, and it will be on a ship with a water layer (radiation shielding) between the outer hull and the cabin - a much better environment for humans. Thus this article is not the determining factor for whether or not Mars is a pipe dream.

The other big danger of spaceflight is the body's response to microgravity, which can be solved with a massive centrifuge. Hard, but possible.

Telling humans to not dream and have hope for colonizing Mars is an egregious offence. The window of technology is open, but it will not be open forever. We will lose our technology in the future, either soon or in many millenia. In addition, there is rising tension in our low-growth society. A few more natural disasters or bad geo-political alliances and tensions might explode, hastening the closing of our technology window. Should that window close, and we fail to reach Mars, then humans will be a grand failure: We had all the resources to colonize another planet and begin colonizing the Universe, but instead we killed ourselves as we gave in to our aggressive tendencies.

Thus we _must_ be more ambitious. We _must_ dream big and strive every day to do the impossible, for the cost of not striving may be another 14-billion-year waiting period to get the opportunity to do this again, on another planet, at another time, waiting for another species to awaken with consciousness and begin it's own effort to overcome the Great Filter[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

[QAPereo]

I’m into science, not quasi religious hope in the face of the terror of our own extinction. If we leave Earth, we’ll be solving nothing, we are the problem. At best we’d be delaying something, not solving the underlying issues of what led us to flee Earth. If you think of Mars as a backup for Earth then think again, it needs to be independent of Earth, and that’s a dream for now.

Less hope, more rational thought might save us; hope lets you ignore reality and live for a dream.

Just live.

[crush-n-spread]

In your first argument, you argued that we could not colonize Mars. Now you concede that we can colonize Mars, while arguing humans have a fundamental flaw. What is your point, and why do you hold it?