tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post1395016901036988924..comments2024-03-28T18:32:05.933-04:00Comments on bensozia: Mars One is not FeasibleJohnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01037215533094998996noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8304928500646903522.post-55691039612978379362015-08-23T08:35:20.123-04:002015-08-23T08:35:20.123-04:00They may not get to Mars, but their TV ratings wil...They may not get to Mars, but their TV ratings will. *eyeroll*<br /><br />Space travel for anything other than research purposes is an absurdity. But people desperately want to believe in the Shiny Space Future we've all been promised since the 1950s in one form or another.<br /><br />The Jetsons might be laughable to the modern masses, but only because it sports a cliche retro aesthetic instead of the slick new futurism of the present day. The substance of the space travel pipe dream remains the same: a glamorous and somehow magically inevitable pie-in-the-sky future full of technological wonders that will solve all of our problems.<br /><br />The world around us frightens and concerns us, so we turn our gaze skywards, thinking that if only we can spread out among the stars, somehow life will suddenly be amazing and wonderful. People get breathlessly "inspired" by the trumped up notion that we are somehow meant to inherit the universe - that we shall receive it as our "Manifest Destiny". Or perhaps they simply focus too strongly on the beauty of the cosmos, and in doing so become remarkably willing to overlook its cold lethality and inaccessibility.<br /><br />Yet despite the dreaming, space is like Mount Everest - distant, deadly, and devoid of practical value. Only a very small number of people will ever actually go there - almost always those who are both rich and fanatically driven - and of those, a great many will die trying to achieve something completely senseless in the name of petty bragging rights and public prestige for themselves.<br /><br />The pursuit of this madness is the ultimate form of luxury and hubris - a pathetic, selfish, and pointless attempt to elevate the human ego above nature. It is a brute form of "conquest", without even the ancient tribal rationale of practical gain to justify it. It is a vain grasping at the immaterial, born from delusion, and cloaked in the stolen trappings of "inspiration" and "achievement". People treat it as a great accomplishment rather than the colossal waste that it is. They revel in the "success" of those who go and return alive, conveniently forgetting the frozen dead that will never be recovered.<br /><br />Humanity might someday get off this rock. But only in the sense of sending a pitifully small and fragile offshoot of our species into the void, and only at colossal costs. Our nearest stellar neighbors are so far as to make even mere communication between us unfeasible - the time lag would render two-way conversation impossible; one-way monologuing difficult and confusing at best, while ultimately of little value.<br /><br />They could not return to us anything tangible - at best, they could offer us a stupendously pitiful degree of parallax in our observations of the universe at large, but to what possible point and significant purpose, I cannot for the life of me imagine. Whatever possible intangible benefits there might conceivably be, it would be staggeringly difficult to justify the expenditure required to achieve it.G. Verlorennoreply@blogger.com