this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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We'll probably fuck up our own planet badly enough that we'll never actually get the chance to try terraforming Mars
I heard sometime interesting regarding that recently, if we have the ability to terraform Mars, we'll have the ability to hear on earth. So why not just fix it here where it's millions of times easier than doing it on Mars.
The solution for Earth isn't going to be some pie-in-the-sky terraforming (which, I'd like to note, means "to make Earth-like") project, but changing our psychotic economic system that depends on infinite growth and consistently elevates the worst of us into positions of power.
That's why I think we'll never manage to unfuck ourselves. There's just way too much power invested in keeping things the way they are
Does that mean you're for or against teroforming Mars?
I have nothing against the idea of terraforming Mars, I just don't think terraforming is going to save us from ourselves.
Like I said I just don't believe we'll ever get to that point – because we'll fuck things up on the only currently livable planet so badly that I doubt mass-scale industrial society will survive long enough for terraforming Mars to become relevant.
If things ever work out on mars, it will be because its a hyper isolated, filtered microsociety that has nothing to do with "humanity" as we know it.
Right, because “humanity” has nothing to do with hyper isolated, filtered microsocieties.
Well they are trying it here too of course, but obviously it will be easier when there is lots of empty space between you and the people that want to disturb your isolation. Humans be humans after all.
Two things:
Who says capitalism depends on infinite growth? I often hear that criticism, but I don’t see where it’s coming from? I’ve not heard a capitalist say this, only anti-capitalists. What is it about capitalism that requires this growth?
Can you name anything, anywhere, which exists without growing? Doesn’t even have to be alive, just asking for any phenomenon that just exists without growing.
So I guess it’s one point expressed two ways: “Requiring constant growth” is not a valid criticism of our current economic system.
The modern take on stock investment is to not give dividends, so the only way for shareholders to make money is to have the company grow indefinitely.
Obviously a capitalist won't tell you that. My economy professor kept insisting that efficiency is always positive because it only concerns making a bigger cake, so there is more cake to be divided among the people involved, which he called surplus. In reality greater efficiency has a cost, and the cost is paid by people, while other people pockets the surplus. Fuck capitalists.
So making money in the stock market only works if the pie keeps on expanding? I think that’s a way to take advantage of the fact that our economy is expanding, but I don’t think that’s the definition of capitalism.
Your original point was that the pie doesn't need to keep expanding, so you have been disproved I would say. Saying that the economy need to keep expanding is the same as saying the economy is based on infinite growth. If it stops expanding the stocks are not profitable anymore and the shareholders are going to vote to replace CEOs, so the CEOs have an incentive to make he companies grow at any cost.
You explained how one business relies on growth, in order to enrich its stockholders.
That is not the same as saying how the entire economy needs to expand.
Also it doesn’t differentiate it from anything else, since literally everything (I’m using the word phenomenon in its most literal form here — feel free to challenge me on any phenomenon) must grow or cease existing.
Have you taken a critical look at why you feel so compelled to defend capitalism? I'm honestly curious, because unless you're trolling for lols (which would also be sad), it's similar to excuses from a victim in an abusive relationship; you are a victim of capitalism and are apologizing for it.
Economists and politicians generally believe that we need to keep the global economy growing by around 3 percent annually
Why capitalism is obsessed with growth
Primarily because when other people are given authority over me, they tend to find ways to shut me down.
Generally speaking I’m ridiculously good at things when I do them my own way, but I’ve often not been permitted to, instead offered “this great option the government has authorized for people”.
It’s just like I need the leeway to innovate and prove my worth based on outcomes, in order to survive in this world. I am autistic, and I draw a lot of hostility from people. The problem is, people won’t acknowledge (hence own and then turn off) this hostility. Everyone believes they’re a great person and so the mechanism by which they can actually improve is missing.
What am I trying to say here?
I guess I’m saying I don’t trust people to be consistent with their compassion. I trust people’s self interest more than I trust their compassion, and in my experience the compassion comes with rules abojt what you can’t do, and when I stay inside the same lanes as everyone else I fail hard and I generally get kicked out of things despite following every rule and performing every duty.
So because all of humanity treats me essentially as a frenemy, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of it or interested in cultivating that awareness, I try to avoid being under the power of others as much as I can, even (especially?) people who think they’re helping me.
Free markets allow the marginalized to succeed without having to cut off 80% of themselves to play the role of a correctly-shaped cookie.
Now, can you articulate some kind of “you’re abused” model of me defending capitalism that goes deeper than “you’re defending X and sometimes abuse victims defend their abusers, therefore your X is abusive”? Or is that as far as the analogy goes?
I have been abused, incidentally. Twice. Both times by people who said and believed that they loved me.
I simply do not trust people’s good intentions for me to produce good outcomes. This is why I think free market mechanisms, where everyone is only entering into deals that both parties want, aside from being morally correct at a fundamental level, is also a great mechanism for cutting through people’s self delusion.
If you aren’t buying what I’m selling, then under a free market that forces me to adapt. Requiring your consent keeps me in line and vice versa.
Non-consensual economic systems, ie the ones not based on free markets, aren’t just morally wrong. They’re also consistent in producing bad outcomes.
If you’ve got more on this “you sound like an abuse victim” angle I’m all ears but so far all I’ve seen is this “people defend abusers therefore defended things are abusive” component to the theory and that’s weak.
I could easily say that people who want someone else to take away their economic consent, for their own good of course, has been addled by abuse. I just don’t, because it’s cheap and uninformative.
Well firstly, I appreciate your earnest reply.
If you are not familiar, I highly recommend checking out "egoism," and Max Stirner.
Your perspective sounds like a place of self and economic -awareness I was in, where I then was able to recognize that the "free market" is actually predicated on "might makes right," and that the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" has been, and continues to be, artificially forced as the salient concept of human evolution, and used to perpetuate domination of the "weak" by the "strong" as a natural, even moral, eventuality.
If you are not familiar with "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution," I highly suggest it, and Kropotkin.
I believe that you are wary of abuse by people claiming to operate in your best interest. I am, too. I also believe there are people and forces who do not have our best interests in mind, and it is in their best interest to make us think that working together is bad for us, individually, and that competing with one another is natural and good.
The truth, as I see it, is that working together is natural, and that when there are forces of domination - hierarchy, oppression - fundamentally opposed to our individually thriving, working together is safer, too. I would really appreciate it if you would look into anarchism (not anarchy), with the level head you brought to this discussion.
I am firmly anti-capitalism, but I don't believe in any of the conceptual alternatives of "taking away economic consent" etc. that you mentioned. Capitalism, including "free-market," is a system of control regardless of nomenclature. I encourage broadly looking into "anticapitalism" while trying to leave biases about "failed states" that occurred in history (crushed by capitalism) at the door; again, the identity politics is a wedge keeping us from sharing perspectives.
Can't write more now, feel free to message me.
We won’t have the ability to terraform Mars until we try to terraform Mars.
Perhaps Mars’s greatest contribution to our civilization wont be that it hosts cities or future life, but rather simply that it gave us a place to experiment so we could test things once before implementing them here.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Also, I'm not entirely convinced that the problems are analogous. Mars needs to be warmed up, Earth needs to be cooled down. I think a more appropriate challenge would be terragorming Venus.
I have a feeling we'll learn plenty of applicable lessons from one with the other.
If we can teraform Venus we can teraform the galaxy. The planet is inhospitable in every single way. We can't even land spacecraft that last very long. If materials don't melt from the heat and disintegrate from the atmosphere, then the volcanos ought to do the trick.
It's also harder to get to Venus than it is Mars.
Kurzgesagt did a video on the topic. We just build a planet-sized sunshade to freeze the atmosphere, launch the excess CO2 into space, and import water from the ice moons of the gas giants. Simple, really.
Cost, 100 to 1000 trillion. We can barely fund NASA
Every argument I ever hear against thinking about things in the cool space future boils down to "we couldn't do it this financial quarter so it'll never be possible at all".
I like to think about the spacefaring AI (or cyborgs, if we're lucky) that will inevitably do this stuff in our stead, assuming we don't strangle them in the cradle.
Why not both?
Although Mars is still a terrible candidate for terraforming. It's at the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, and even if you can solve the temperature, radiation, and atmosphere issues to create a viable ecosystem, it's still going to cause problems for humans thanks to the low gravity.
Venus on the other hand could realistically function as a second earth if we clean up the atmosphere.
The cost would thousand of trillions at least, in fact it may cost more money to do something like that than currently exists. We can barely fund NASA.
Frankly if humanity ever could get together politically to allocate enough resources to do anything like this, Im fairly sure a few greedy billionaires would stick most of those public funds in their pockets, and we'd end up with nothing at the end.
Im sorry to say Im pretty pessimistic about us as a species getting anywhere. Hell we're 80 year out from WW2 and still struggling to control fascism.
No one's trying to put terraforming Venus into next year's budget. This is all theoretical talk about what would be possible to do some day.
The cost of terraforming Venus would be large, but the benefits of having a second habitable planet are also quite large. Even ignoring the benefits of having more land and resources, there's also the just the fact that being on two planets means we can potentially survive as a species if something happens to one of them.
It would also have to be heavily automated, and only really becomes realistic once you have machines that are essentially self-sufficient at which point the concept of "cost" becomes a lot fuzzier. It would mean dedicating resources, but you aren't paying an army of self-replicating robots.
However, the sheer scale of the task means that the benefits would only be seen many generations later. It would require extreme efficiency and long term planning with little tolerance for error. The kind of people who would make such an investment are unlikely to just hand the money over to the shadiest billionaire they can find. And it would be difficult to keep a scam going if they need to show continual progress decade after decade.
Maybe we'll never see enough progress to overcome the kind of greed and short term thinking that would doom a huge, world-altering endeavor like this. But if that's the case, it's more likely that we'd just never try. All the more reason to keep pointing out what could be instead of just accepting the shittiness that we see today.
Just out of curiosity are you writing this from the Fertile Crescent?
ancient alien crazy hair guy appears
Okay but what if we lived in the moon
Terraforming Mars will be a first step to terraforming Earth. We’ll attempt to create a new biosphere and that will help us understand how ours works.
The tech needed to terraform mars is thousands of years away. There isn't enough water or O2 on Mars to terraform it. As well as a whole host of other issues that we currently have no idea how to fix. (The lack of a magnetosphere is a huge one)
Right so we give it a magnetosphere.
Rather than restarting Mars's internal magnetic field, could we build a solar or nuclear powered artificial magnetic field?
Something like a swarm of satellite drones at the Sun-Mars L1 point?
Nah man what we need is a solar wind-powered artificial magnetic field. Make the problem pay for its own solution.
Eh, maybe we figure out a way to mimic one gigantic magnetic field with a sphere of small component fields. Maybe it’s a swarm of satellites each of which has its own little field and somehow they’re powering themselves with the momentum from the diverted solar wind. Like, the problem is too much kinetic energy input from the sun. And then the other problem is too little energy. All we gotta do is make sure the kinetic energy gets absorbed by the lithosphere, not the atmosphere. Ultimately that could be the swarm using gravity to transfer captured solar wind energy from orbit, through the atmosphere without interference, to the lithosphere.
Like, you know, people think of shit they didn’t think of before. Our engineering scales over time. It scales in scale. We’ll get it done.
I definitely don't agree with that take.
First of all, "terraforming" means "to make Earth-like"; climate mitigation is one thing, but if we let things here get bad enough that we have to start thinking about terraforming Terra, we've pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch at that point. Ending up with an Earth that is no longer Earth-like would mean that things have gone sideways so badly that I doubt we'd have the industrial capacity or resources to deal with it.
Second, terraforming Mars involves a vastly different process than unfucking our climate and ecosystems. For example, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, which on top of being thin is mostly CO^2^ and doesn't have more than trace amounts of oxygen. There's also no magnetosphere to speak of because its "core dynamo" essentially died when its core cooled down and plate tectonics etc stopped being a thing, meaning that any atmosphere you do manage to generate is continuously getting blasted away by radiation.
Terraforming Mars essentially means pumping more energy and gases into its climate system via whetever method, while the problem here on Earth is that we've pumped too much energy into the climate system and we'd have to somehow get it "out" again.
So because one problem is too much X, and the other problem is too little X, those are distinct problems that don’t inform one another?
I'd rather beta test on Mars before we go down the path of unintended consequences on Earth.