By Albert Burneko
9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
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We can land corpses or soon-corpses on Mars sure. Getting people there and back reliably and in good shape is going to be extremely difficult if not completely impossible. And the benefit is near zero.
difficult yes, of course. impossible, not even close. NASA’s goal is by the 2030s - even if you don’t believe that timeline which would be fair, the technology is well within our reach.
Every time we do it we learn from it. That’s nowhere near zero.