Monday, May 13, 2019

Mars, Bitches

This made the rounds again after Jeff Bezos revealed his Elysium plans, but it applies to every dumb billionaire and non-billionaire nerd fantasy that we have to go to the "stars" in order to save humanity when the Earth gets all blowed up somehow.

Let’s start with Mars, which is a favorite planet for colonization scenarios, including for Elon Musk who thinks we should colonize Mars because earth will eventually face a “doomsday scenario”. The problem with this is that there is almost nothing that could happen to earth that would make it less hospitable than Mars. Whether it’s nuclear war or massive global warming, post disaster earth would be way more habitable than Mars.

Maybe we'd better figure out how to transform our selves into sentient space cloud beings before the supernova, but, otherwise, doing our best to keep this little blue dot going for a little while longer is a bit better use of our AmazonBucks. Generally "ameliorating human suffering, whatever the current circumstances" should be our concern, and I don't think our billionaires with their lego space toys care much about that, really.