this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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You do realize the physical challenges inherent in both, and that the former environment is far more difficult than the latter to prepare for, yes? 😅
On Mars, you have no help. Nothing for at least a year. It's hard to even send a message. Going to the moon ain't shit compared to Mars. If you need supplies or repairs or people or even communication, the vastness of space is far far more apparent.
On Earth within an underwater base, if you need help from the surface, they are already up there. Almost instant speeds to get a message, and a few hours to a day to get at least something down to the base. Worse-case, you can gear up and swim up to the attached platform, and strategize there.
Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.
That's a good post, and you're right about nearly all of it. I'm with you all the way until your conclusion.
A few things, first, there's no doubt that we could have gotten there in the 60s we had the technology then, and we still do. But that's obviously not the hard part.
Second, no part of a sustained base in space requires a base underwater, they're a mostly different set of challenges. Honestly, I expect time will tell on this one (and pretty soon), the US and China are both racing to put a base on the moon, nobody to my knowledge, is planning a deep sea base.
And it's quite understood that the moon is a stepping stone, if you can find water there, that's the essential material needed to sustain life. But it's also exactly what you need to produce rocket fuel. If you create a spacecraft capable of getting to the moon, refuelling there would allow you to get to anywhere else in the solar system. So while an underwater base could teach some of these lessons, I expect that In practice, a moon base will teach us how to live everywhere else in space. Because not only is that closer to the goal, it's what we're actively doing.
You do realize that a lack of atmosphere (ie. vacuum) is essentially the opposite of being underwater, insofar as human survivability is concerned here, right?
Right?