this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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What the F is every corporation's boner with rockets? 🚀
Because the last stage of existence on this planet. Will be febel plans to try and colonize other planets. Because our planet will start to poison us as a defensive mechanism. All of these Corporations need a plan to get off planet.
Imo it's a good thing tho. Spreading our civilization across multiple planets is the only way to guarantee long long term success. Obviously we should also fix the climate change issue (and many others). But still, being spread across the solar system would give our species redundancy. An extinction event on earth like a large meteor strike would no longer be the end.
Well good thing it will never happen. ☺️
Imagine trying to undo thousands and thousands of years of evolution surrounding…. Earth’s gravity.
But you go ahead and fantasize about us destroying all the planets in the universe. After all; we’re the only thing destroying ours.
Call me an optimist, but I still hold the hope that we can one day do better as humanity than we do now. Humanity has become a "better" species throughout its existence overall. Even a hundred years ago we were much more horrible and brutal than we are now. The current trend is not great, with climate change and far-right grifters taking control. But I hold hope that in the end this is but a blip on the radar. Horrible for us now, but in the grand scheme of things not something that will end humanity. It might in the worst case set us back a few hundred years.
While what you said is true,
i guess that most people's motivation is rather the economic benefits. Think of it this way:
The 1960s space race created jobs all across the US and inspired a generation of scientists.
Mars settlement could do the same, but bigger. At least that's the idea.
It would take a lot to make Mars more habitable than Earth. This isn't about colonisation this is simply that it's cool to build rockets.
Yeah, it's easier to terraform ... Planet Earth!
It's the only planet we can terraform (As in repairing some of the damage we've done), we are nowhere near able to terraform Mars, not even theoretically and disregarding cost.
Maybe in a century we can. But only maybe.
Hypothetically, we could terraform Venus. At the very least, it shares a lot of the issues that we're trying to fix on Earth, just dialled up to 11 - its main problems are that it's way too hot, the atmosphere has way too much carbon in it (96.5% vs Earth's 0.04%), and the atmosphere has way too much sulfur (0.015% vs Earth's 0.00000002%, making the atmosphere highly acidic). So if for example scientists had an idea for causing a chain reaction in a planetary atmosphere that rapidly sequestered all atmospheric carbon but were worried about unknown strength or side effects, instead of testing it on Earth where it could kill us all, they could test it on Venus where any failures would have no serious consequences. And if it worked, not only would it mean that we fix climate change on Earth but we partially terraform Venus into the bargain.
Venus has roughly similar gravity to Earth and has a ferrous core which could hypothetically be turned molten (and therefore ferromagnetic) to provide the same kind of magnetosphere that Earth's core does. Mars has neither of these things and would therefore never be able to sustain human life naturally - Venus potentially could. On Mars, the atmosphere is just one of many obstacles. On Venus it's THE obstacle. Solve the atmosphere, you solve Venus.
Mars is the best option we have, which is why I mentioned that. Venus already has selfenforcing runaway global warming, and we can't even land a probe there, because the environment is extremely hostile.
Mars is by far the easier option.
Feeble? But I think you meant futile? Idk.
The planet isn't doing anything, we are poisoning ourselves. Or as lemmy puts it "big evil corporations (which we support everyday because it's cheaper than buying local/sustainable) are poisoning us".
Yes, let spend money to fuck up other planets as well instead of saving this one. /s
That’s exactly what they will say.
Reusable rockets, in particular.
Imagine having a reusable car in a world where they were all disposable.