Mars or bust

[james_davis_nicoll]

Mars fans anticipate trading only known habitable planet for world where any unprotected human would immediately perish

Comments

[redbird]

This article seems to have run into Tom Lehrer's observation [1], decades ago, that sometimes reality makes a satirist's work impossible.

Also, there's either a missing ">" or a stray "</a" at the end of that link.

[1] Lehrer was reacting to the war criminal Henry Kissinger having been given the Nobel Peace Prize. That prize was awarded jointly to Kissinger and the North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, who declined on the basis that Vietnam was not yet at peace.

[princessofgeeks]

Well done!

[jessie_c]

“That said, it would get a lot of obnoxious techbros who can’t stop talking to their co-workers about crypto off the planet. So maybe we shouldn’t dismiss this Mars project outright.”
After all, it worked for the Golgafrinchans.

[jbwoodford]

Sure, but what would we be vulnerable to without obnoxious techbros? I'll bet they couldn't sanitize a telephone handset at all.

[jessie_c]

It's just possible that they act like a filtering net to catch random inspiration particles before they could cause harm to the general population.

Equally, spreading those inspiration particles through the whole population means that proportionally more of them would strike people entirely unable to act upon them so this idea is really a wash.

[kaffy_r]

I did not know of The Beaverton, and I am very happy to learn about it. And I wish good travels to every techbro who wants to go to Mars, armed only with the knowledge that he is the smartest guy in the room.

Obviously not the smartest guy elsewhere, but that's neither here nor there ....

[neowolf2]

If these people want the experience of living in small metal enclosures, deprived of most material possessions and services, surrounded by danger on all sides, we could just send them to prison.

[dewline]

Thank you for this!