jack

I'm bouncing around this thread calling out all the problems with space colonization as a solution to problems on Earth, and I'd like to give just one example of why terraforming Mars is, for all practical terms, completely impossible. And I'm going off the premise that terraforming is necessary to make Mars actually habitable for large groups of humans - the resource cost of self-contained spaces all over the planet would be far too high to make sense as a solution to living even on a degraded Earth.

Mars's atmosphere is 1/50th the density of the Earth's. Its current total mass is 2.5e+16 kg. To get it on par with Earth's (the reasonable threshold for habitability), we'd need to increase the mass of its atmosphere to 1.25e+18 kg. What's that number? That's 1,250,000,000,000,000,000 kg. Typically, the solution for providing Mars an atmosphere is to slam it with carbonaceous asteroids over and over until the endless collisions have formed a carbon-dense atmosphere from which we can start. Let's assume, generously, that 20% of the mass of an asteroid hitting a planet permanently becomes asteroid (that's very high but we're going with it to demonstrate the absurdity of this proposition). That means we'll need to bombard Mars with 6.25 x 10^18 kg of asteroids. Let's not worry about how many asteroids and assume we can do it with maximum efficiency. We just need to move asteroids from the closest portion of the belt to Mars. To do so we're ignoring the issues of: finding the asteroids (they are mostly very small), getting to the asteroids (they are very far apart), halting their momentum (they move very quickly), and developing the technology to move them (we don't have anything resembling a prototype for this). We're going to pretend we have a space station in the asteroid belt that keeps pace with Mars's orbit and always has something to launch. All we're looking for is the energy needed to transport that much mass that far.

The distance we need to cover in the most generous possible circumstance is 250 million km - about twice the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Converting kg to N will land us roughly around 5,625,000,000,000,000,000 N. To move that our 250M km is going to take 1.41026167125e+30 joules. Wow! That's a big number. What does it tell us? Well, annual global energy consumption is about 295167599999997700000 joules. That's 1/4,777,833,580 of the number we require to move suffficient atmospheric mass from the asteroid belt to Mars. So, if we reoriented every single ounce of energy on earth exclusively to building an atmosphere of sufficient mass (NOT COMPOSITION!!!) under impossibly optimistic conditions, it would take 4.7 billion years. Oh, and there would be 0 energy left over for human needs. Oh well!

When I say "terraforming Mars is impossible", this is what I mean.

(I did all this math myself so hopefully nothing's off)

Earth is clearly already on a death spiral.

No matter how bad things get on earth, they will be much, much easier to improve to habitable conditions than Mars. The difference in resource investment required is so many orders of magnitude as to be almost unquantifiable in terms that relate to any real world economic activity. Like, 1000 years of the entire productive capacity of the Earth to even begin to meaningfully change the climate of Mars to something where we could live there.

I consider it only natural for humanity to spread, and stagnation leads to issues like we are dealing with now. Resource shortage, climate change, pollution.

Why is it natural for humanity to spread? All three of those issues on earth are extremely solvable through a different economic system. We don't even need new technology. Population growth is obviously not going to continue for ever - it's already declining. Our planet has more than enough resources to live here sustainably until the sun burns out in a few hundred million years. We simply need to stop allowing a parasitic class to destroy things for their own short-term gain. You might scoff at the infeasibility of that task, but I promise you it is far easier than shipping billions of people through space and all the resources necessary to sustain them on a planet where not only are they not evolved to live, but where the conditions for life are worse than literally any spot on Earth. It simply doesn't make sense.

#justsettlerthings

correct

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I ask everybody who mentions being in one so you very well may have

Great takedown.

Curious, what's your party?

Vietnam has such a large population that it is regionally significant, but yeah, definitely not a world power. The only real world powers are the US, Russia, China, and sometimes a messy block of the biggest EU countries. India might get there someday by virtue of size but economic development there is very bad. Countries like Iran, Brazil, the UK, Japan, and Mexico are globally significant but their power projection is a shadow of what the big three can do.

Sadly China has not been interested in actively building international socialism in a long time. Maybe that will change one day, but not yet.

and hexbites tell me that Bernie is just a democratic party sheepdog

There are organizations planning for America's deepening (but not fundamentally new or different) fascism. Every city of modest size will have some kind of mutual aid organizations, but they are also going to be way too small to systematically address the task at hand. Then there are more political organizations, parties and the like, building revolutionary movements to destroy this entire rotten system.

MA has some of the highest requirements of any state we're trying to get on the ballot in. You can help! Votesocialist2024.com/volunteer