Rich people want to go to space with their rich friends so that they don't have to see the poors. That and they probably figure they can get out of paying taxes if they live in space.

"I got mine, the rest of you can go fuck yourselves." -The Wealthy

Katie,
Agree. Your post title says it succinctly.

This planet, our own needs work.

Pampered rich people will not do well in the deprivation that is life outside of Earth's atmosphere. They should all go.

I've never understood this stance on space exploration, especially when there are vastly larger, nastier resource-consuming activities out there that don't have any of its potential upsides. By the same logic everyone should discontinue the following, to better refocus their energies on the more important things:

commissioning art
exploring the ocean
buying coffee, pot, or other non-essential consumables
conducting basic scientific research
traveling for pleasure
meditating
keeping a journal
testing speculative disease treatments
having a child
etc etc etc

Katie, we need to do both. Maintaining the habitability of our home planet is vital and necessary, but at some point in the not-too-distant-future we're really going to need the option of having another place besides earth to live, whether it's Mars or Ceres or Luna or Europa, because: A of All). remember how the dinosaurs - and about 99% of all organic life on the planet - was wiped out by a giant asteroid? That could happen again (we've already documented a few near-misses that, while perhaps not on the order of a mass-extinction event would have definitely fucked things up pretty seriously); B of All). the human population continues to grow at an accelerated rate (we hit 8 billion in 2011, should hit 9 B in another six years or so, and 10 B by the early 2040's), and eventually we're going to severely stress our resources to the point that not only quality of life, but life itself is going to become increasingly difficult for a very large percentage of our children and grandchildren, and; C of All) humanity has to learn to become a space-faring race, both because of A and B, and because it's in our collective long-term interest, if we want to survive as a species.

Now, if you want to argue that mankind doesn't deserve to survive; that our inability to act as good, conscientious stewards of our home world disqualifies us somehow from that, well, go right ahead. But, that's not only defeatist, it represents essentially the same mind-set you criticize in religious believers: we were given this planet as a gift and we're squandering it, therefore we deserve to become extinct. I, and I'm sure plenty of others don't buy into that for a second. Yes, we can become better stewards, but it's not an either/or scenario; we can and SHOULD explore both as viable options, because, as THINKING animals, creating options to maximize our survival is a skill set we're actually pretty good at - when we need and choose to be. That's how we became the dominant life form on earth in the first place: by thinking our way out of an ever-increasingly complex set of obstacles and challenges. To do anything less going forward would be literally forcing ourselves to STOP evolving, and I for one am not in the least bit interested or willing to do that.

not to be a full on flat-earther, but can anyone tell me how nasa came about that image they are publishing? sure seems CGI to me. also. judge me if you want. but the moon landing footage is still pretty unconvincing to me... sorry

Don't be an idiot, Dabbler.

@7

Maybe stop dabbing and read a fucking book?

Just a thought.

@8:

Some people just can't help being what they are...

Even if we were able to terraform Mars into a lush green biosphere, humans would still not be able to stay there on a long-term basis, because the gravity on Mars is simply too weak.
Children born on a martian Colony may never be able to travel to earth.

I think before we pack our bags to leave for another planet we should try a few simpler things, like mining asteroids or building greenhouses on the moon.

Yeah fix up our own shit first. Even for a tech nerd like me, space travel is highly overrated. In addition to the excellent points Katie made, there is an almost insurmountable problem with sending humans into space: radiation. Once we leave the comfort of our Van Allen Belts, one gets blasted with high energy radiation from our sun and deep space radiation from the stars. You can't make a lead spaceship, pure and simple.

I thought awhile back that although asteroid, Moon, and even Mars mining could be technically and financially feasible, it wouldn't be done by chain smoking Bruce Willis lookalikes. Instead, it would be a skeleton crew of robot geeks, basically Battlebot champs. They would travel with the mining or product creating bots and be there to maintain and fix the robots. They would be paid very, very well, (one time salary), and basically sign their life away before they left for the mission, knowing they would probably die before age 50. Which also means they would be young and impressionable, so pretty much freshly graduated nerds in their early twenties.

We can certainly do both, but space should take a back seat to home.

@12 forgot to mention the gravity part, as @11 did. Recently a twin spent a year on the space station so he could be compared to his brother. The results are discouraging, to say the least.

@13 - Right. I mean, how can we expect to overcome those hurdles when we're still unable to calculate longitude from the deck of a pitching sailing vessel, due to the technical challenges associated with building an accurate timepiece for that environment?

These comments from people who think space exploration is an either/or proposition are so misinformed. NASA's budget is 1/4th of 1% of Federal spending. 0.0025%. If you were to cut 0.0025% from the end of a dollar bill you wouldn't even touch the ink. But somehow, NASA is seen as hugely expensive. How about the 57% spent on Defense every year? Yeah, I know how important it is to drop bombs on brown people. #sarcasm

@14 not even close to being in the same technical hurdle. If you get lost at sea, you get lost at sea. You might die you might not. Cosmic rays kill you every time.

@15 the article meant Bezos spending not NASA unless I missed something on my phone skim.

@10
I dunno, i still have faith in the human animal. But yeah, dumbos gonna dumb.

Queen Isabella and Columbus endured similar pouting.

@15
I don't think the point is we can't do both, i think the point is we don't deserve to do the one, because we can't seem to fix the other, which is arguably (there's that word!) more important.

@kylecheez

"You can't make a lead spaceship, pure and simple."
Technically speaking, you could design a lead shielded space vessel, if it was built in space; and if the ship was designed to stay in space.
The real question would be, how thick would the lead shielding need to be and what sort of propulsion system would be efficient.

Of course, building a ship in space would be challenging to say the least. Using shuttles to load and unload passengers and cargo would also be difficult. The propulsion system would be the most challenging aspect of the entire project. I would definitely say that it would be one of the most difficult things mankind has ever attempted, but I wouldn't say that it was an impossibility.

@19

Honestly, I think the two issues are intertwined.

Fixing the Earth is going to require a vast amount of resources, and we're not going to be able to pull those resources out of the Earth.
The only way we're going to get those resources is by mining extraterrestrial bodies like asteroids, the moon, or Mars.
And it's not just about fixing the Earth either, it's also about maintaining a standard of living for billions of people.

@19:

It's this whole concept of "we don't deserve to do Y, because we haven't done X" proposition that irks me. Who SAYS we don't deserve to survive as a species, despite our bumbling efforts? I don't recall any society, culture, or civilization ever putting such a question to a vote. We'll survive, not because we "deserve to", but because SOME of us have the will to do so, and a smaller number of others have the means, both technically and financially, to make that happen. Sure, it'll be expensive, and take time - lots and lots of both, to be sure, but that in and of itself doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

The sobering truth is that we may have already passed the tipping-point in terms of what we can do to arrest anthropomorphic climate change, at least to the extent that the biosystem can restore itself through natural means in a relatively short time-span; which means we either just give up and wait for our inevitable extinction (or at-best suffer a massive die-off that significantly reduces the number of Homo Sapiens-Sapiens on the planet down to a pre-industrial level), or we do what we can - whatever we can - to start taking steps NOW to ensure some kind of survival for future generations. Whether that's here on earth or out in the black; either - or both - would be fine by me. But, you don't solve a problem by working on only a single solution at a time: you look at multiple solutions and focus on those with the greatest chance for success. IMO, both options are viable, both are necessary, and both should be pursued, if only because we don't have the foggiest idea at this point which of the two will prove most effective in terms of achieving the stated objective.

But one thing I DO know: you most definitely DON'T solve a problem by throwing your hands up and declaring, "we don't deserve to solve this!" - unless of course you don't actually WANT to solve it.

@15 I did miss the NASA reference. Will have to call out Katie for that one, bad example, the probe was already budgeted before the problems in Puerto Rico.

Too far from the sun; too small to have strong enough gravity to hold on to the planet's atmosphere: so no OXYGEN, no accessible water, no way to grow food; too small for all the people on Earth; takes too long to get there, (and back if things don't work out - assuming Earth hasn't been destroyed), etc. etc., AND even if they can solve all these problems and make Mars livable, remember how Logan's Run's domed world KILLED everyone over 30 because there were only enough room and resources for young people, (unless the brave colonizers don't procreate), Bezos and Musk and all the other gazillionaires - who think it's okay to destroy Earth so they can get richer then move to Mars - will be euthanized by their grandchildren as soon as they finish building that dome!

They might be able to (some day, after years and lots of money) build shuttles that can take some of them there to visit, but colonize? Hahahahaha, NO!

Retooling for sustainable societies ultimately demands doing away with deregulated capitalism and probably growth so expanding.beyond the confines of our mostly closed system is the only way out for robber barons.

"I don't think the point is we can't do both"

Nope. There are finite resources available on this planet.

The amount of money, resources, and effort to sustain a colony on Mars would drain national economies and cost infinitely more than just fixing the problems we have here.

Niel DeGrasse Tyson once outlined very concretely that just lifting enough material out of our gravity well to sustain a dozen or so humans on Mars with any known technology would be the equivalent of sustaining TENS OF MILLIONS of humans here.

So. No. We absolutely cannot do both.

Now, if you want to argue for researching mining asteroids with automated systems, fine. But so called "colonization" of Mars (or anywhere else off world) is a senseless waste that will lead to famine and death until either technology improves by an order of magnitude or we solve major environmental and resource problems here on earth first.

@24:

Lots of water on Mars: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/mars-buried-water-ice-subsurface-geology-astronauts-science/

Technically feasible to generate oxygen - and fuel - using Mar's mostly CO2 atmosphere (YES, Mars has an atmosphere): https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151285-how-we-could-make-oxygen-on-mars-plus-fuel-to-get-home/

Who said ANYTHING about transplanting 7,000,000,000 people? That's just stupid and no one has EVER suggested such a ridiculous idea - excepting yourself. You don't need to get everyone off-planet to ensure species survival: you just need to get enough people off Earth to mine asteroids for minerals, the moon for H3 (which will come in VERY handy for future energy production), comets for water - lots of it, more than currently exists on Earth, The amount of resources available just within the relatively narrow confines of our own solar system could sustain a population 100 times greater than what we have now - we just have to reach out and grab them while we still have the means to do so.

As for limiting population/growth, well, that's going to be a pretty simple problem to solve, because we have things - available RIGHT NOW - to prevent unwanted pregnancies, perhaps you've heard of them? You don't even have to stop procreation entirely, you just have to control it based on the number of people the colony can support. And over time, the better you get at extracting resources, the better you become at building out those support systems, and the more people you can have in the colony.

In short: while these are significant technical, financial, and logistical challenges, they're NOT unsolvable. We already pretty much know HOW do most of these things; it's just a matter of committing ourselves to doing them.

And seriously, no one, literally NO ONE (except, again, yours truly), is suggesting it's "okay to destroy the Earth so they can get richer then move to Mars" - where you do people come up with this cockamamie bullshit, anyway?

@26:

That makes the faulty assumption that ALL of the resources needed to sustain a colony MUST come from Earth, which frankly makes no sense, especially when those same resources already exist in-abundance either on Mars itself or much closer to the gravity well of Mars, namely in the asteroid belt. As I've pointed out above, much of what's needed already exists on Mars, so the idea isn't to drain Earth's resources and transplant them somewhere else, it's to exploit the already existing resources of where you're setting up - what Robert Zubrin has characterized as the "living off the land" concept. Ultimately, in order to make all of this work, you would have to wean yourself from dependency on Earth's resources anyway, so that's already part of the plan that's envisioned for the long-term.

"The only way we're going to get those resources is by mining extraterrestrial bodies like asteroids, the moon, or Mars."

Not Mars. You face the same resource wasting issues you do with Earth. Gravity.

Asteroids, maybe. One day. With self replicating robots of some sort. But not with people. The second you start sending people around you end up wasting any resources you potentially could harvest sustaining people in space. People need oxygen, water, food that ALL has to be brought to them from a gravity well. We have just figured out how to that in a closed man made system yet. Not even close.

Robots can be nuclear or solar powered. Set them loose and have them begin to mine first just to make more robots then to spit back a few hundred kilos of rare metals back at earth a few days. After a few decades it might eventually pay for itself. Humans habitations never will without some magical breakthrough.

Look. We could just barely keep three or four people alive for a couple months just a few million feet off the surface of earth orbiting in a teeny tiny cheap ass tin can that could get regular supplies from the surface. And that still cost billions and billions.

There is no known way to do it for years at a time at the distances of places like Mars.

Yet.

@8 I'm a sci-fi-fi nerd as much as the next guy but this is all a fucking myth at this point. The technology just does not exist, okay. It doesn't.

Almost everything for the first DECADES of a Martian colony of a just dozen or so people would have to come from earth. This a fact. It would cost trillions and trillions of dollars and take unprecedented levels of resources.

There is know known way to bootstrap the required resources from Mars - IF they even exist (All we know for sure Mars has is some water and some iron and minerals).

The cost of getting to those resources is astronomical (no pun intended). Getting a sustainable power supply system to last years to Mars would be ungodly expensive. Even solar power would require tons of lithium ion batteries be brought there. We have no idea if Martial soil can sustain crops, or even if the UV and radiation laden atmosphere wouldn't just sterilize and kill anything you try to plant. And even then they would be under expensive domes.

On and on. There are so many unknowns. Sorry to bust your sci-fi-fi dreams but it's just ridiculous.

I'll go so far as to propose a wealth cap:

Once you have over $X dollars - let's say, to keep conservative, if you have over $1B in assets - you are no longer allowed to earn money. AT ALL. Go into forced retirement, spend your remaining decades on a yacht or in monaco or counting your fingernail clippings, we don't care. You Won. You beat the game. Now leave the money making to people who still need to make money.

May the Fourth be with YOU.
Thanks, Katie!

Instead of taxing companies that create high-paying jobs, why don't we tax the NIMBY single-family home owners more to pay for homeless services? It's not Amazon's fault that zoning has created a scarcity of housing and with the rapid increase in values, well-off homeowners can certainly afford to pay more.

It is worth a mention that there has been no human outside of low-earth orbit since 1972. For some very good reasons.
There are all sorts of limitations to what humans can accomplish in space. But just hand-wave them away if you like. Be as unserious as you please but you have to accept the reality of 50 years with no follow-up to the Apollo program.
No human will set foot on another planet in the lifetime of anyone reading this, accept this fact.

I say, in addition to taking better care of Planet Earth--because it's the only one we've got--why DON'T we jet propel the insanely wealthy charter RepubliKKKan members of the GOP one-way to Mars, on the irrevocable premise that they never return to Earth? If they suffer in the Red Planet, well, for billions of us back here, GOOD.
Problem solved....except...aren't the Martians smarter than we are and know better to accept such gluttonous white-collar criminals? I wouldn't mind seeing Marvin and K-9 zap 'em with their trusty Alludium P-32 Explosive Space Modulator, however.
Delays, delays...........and a glut of Warner Bros. cartoons on Saturday mornings.......

After decades of witnessing the exponentially growing GOP threat to all humanity and life on Earth, I did something right by not having kids or voting RepubliKKKan. Even at age 7 I knew that Richard Milhouse Nixon was a lying sack of shit unfit to govern.

I wonder why NASA, has failed to mention, over the course of 60 years, the effects of cosmic rays on living organism?  They are a million times more potent, than any fukushima radiation, or gamma rays, or x-rays. They will go through anything and are a million times more mutagenic, genotoxic, teratogenic or carcinogenid. Proly would not get halfway to mars. Then fuko wants to build nuke reactors there to fuk up mars. Proly not really, just another excuse for nuc weapons in space. Why do evil scientist monkeys and war monkeys wanna play w the magic rocks? A few ounces of botulism would do worse. Humans are psychotic fuks. We live in in a culture withh so much propaganda and so many lies. Maybe with a tweny foot thick hull filled with mahic liquid but, what the hell would someone do when they got there?
There’s the doom-laden future for astronauts to Mars. Quite simply, cosmic radiation would kill them. Even now, astronauts suffer extraordinary health illeffects, as related by Scott Kelly, in his new book “Endurance” .  Not all these effects are caused by radiation – and this issue merges into the troubling ethical problems of sending people to Mars, or even, into space.

https://antinuclear.net/2017/11/11/nuclear-power-and-space-exploration-theme-for-november-2017/

@6; 27- How about we stop breeding like fucking rabbits? That would solve the population problem here. How on (off?) Earth do you propose to be able to house an unlimilted number of people on a planet that is not suitable for us without extensive modifications? You'd just run into the same population problem there. This Star Trek fantasy that a few people have is just that - a fantasy.

The essence of the human project is to imagine something which does not currently exist that should exist, and bring it into existence.
From tractable animals to writing systems to rat-proof grain storage, all involve multiple people advancing slowly through trial and error.
Mars colonies advance no human purpose beyond vainglory.
On the other hand, imagine a world of no more than 500,000,000 humans living in a few relatively small nations confined to the Northern hemisphere while the rest of the world is allowed to rest and 're-wild'.
My dream is no more unrealistic than yours and far, far more desirable.

@42 Amazing. Who would of thought it possible. But there it is. You know less about evolution than you do physics or politics.

Even if your attempting a facile metaphor it still fails. The ancestors of lungfish and mud skipper known as lobe finned Tetrapoda, weren’t “exploring.” They were driven to drag them selves through shallow puddles over hundreds of millions of years as a survival strategy and required mass extinctions and the geological appearance of fresh water to drive them to do so.

They didn’t just go “hey, I think I evolved primitive lungs I wonder what’s on land,”

Had they done that they would’ve died out. Much like a vain resource wasting attempt to colonize a dead world would humanity before the technology evolves for to even make the attempt remotely survivable.

@43
You had me until "confined to the northern hemisphere", because that means depopulating the global South.
Which, in case you missed it, we've been trying for the last 500-odd years, and which, i submit, is not desirable at all.

My mom always said, "you can't go outside to play until you clean your room", and that's the standard I'm applying here.

The Stranger is the Seattles very own Fox News. It's so cute, dumb, but cute.

The only reason I specified northern hemisphere is the concept is to have limited in area, self-sustaining nations with ample room for domestic animals. With a world population of half a billion it is doable, we have the techniques necessary perfected already.
Everyone could live in comfort and prosperity in a sustainable manner.
Say six different countries all the size of California, the nicest places, where they are located is immaterial but the tropics are probably out.
Humans confined to reservations except for vacations, all natural systems outside the human zones left inviolate.
Not an impossible dream at all once you just project certain trend lines out- climate, ocean stratification, fossil fuel useage... in less than a hundred years we are in shit city and then nobody is going anywhere. Sit here and die in our waste once temps go above 5c warming. Populations WILL shrink dramatically everywhere.

@51- "mutation, survival, and probably instinct" playing out over billions of years is a very different thing than trying to figure out how to get an existing species to survive on another planet. Even if the land was "inhospitable and arid" when vertebrates started colonizing it, they would have found gravity, oxygen, the chemistry and biochemistry needed for life, and actually quite a bit of water when they got there. Not to mention plants to eat. And also that the vast majority of them would have died after the "crawled out" with only the lucky few mutants thriving and giving rise to the terrestrial species we have now.

NONE of that is on Mars. Some of it might be on some other hypothetical planet but you will have to explain to me how you plan to either suspend the laws of physics or invent a magical "hyperdrive" so that they would be accessible in a human lifetime (or even in the lifetime of the hypothetical grandchildren to be born during this hypothetical trip). Ain't happening and there are not going to be any suspended animation pods with Sigourney Weaver in them either.

We just aren't going anywhere regardless of how much people might think it is a cool idea. But the solution to our problems here is pretty clear. Stop breeding, put the resources that people like Bezos are putting into space into sustainable energy work instead, and learn to live within our resources.

It is a fucking disgrace that groups like the Sierra Club have stopped talking about population, and the US government is waging a war on birth control. The Pope could do more to save the Earth in one day by lifting the birth control ban than anything the rest of us can do anytime soon. And don't even start me on these "quiverful" morons.The point is not that any particular religious group is bad, but that our overcrowding issues solely originate from social causes. Nature will fix that eventually, but we may not like it.

@36: I'm a devout Republican, but I voted for Hillary. Do I still get to go to Mars?

We are past the tipping point, and I hate to break it to you, but “us” limiting “our” birth rates has no impact on “them” - pope or not.

There are a lot of “thems” out there.

The greenest thing to do would be kill off a few billion people via war and famine, then let the rest slide back into a precolonised state of being - no petroleum allowed.

Ironic, isn’t it.

I’m not some alarmist that thinks the world(or the Union) will have ended by the time Trump is out, nor am I as embittered as Hawking and his dire predictions, but them’s the breaks.

Off we go.

@54: I think you're most worthy of a good zap from Marvin and K9. Go for it. Just don't bitch at me if your new way of life on the Red Planet isn't what you'd expected, or anything near to what you have had here on Earth.

Your last article was good, this one is goofy. We don't need to live as anything more than tribal hunter-gatherers, but most of us would rather live in this world than in Ted Kaczynski's personal fantasy of a perfect world where 95% if us have died off to leave room for the rest of us to hunt and gather for 14 hours a day before we die of the flu. Technology is a double-edged sword but getting upset with Bezos for not spending it the way you would doesn't un-spend it.

He could always give his spare money to those Chinese kids who earn ten cents an hour to manufacture the crap his website sells?

Both, Katie. Frustrating when progressives don't think of the big picture.

SHORT TERM - people alive now. Rich white privileged people in the USA get to enjoy the fruits of the modern world, and some folks in other rich countries too. Most people struggle. We have way too many people to support a "sustainable" population of hunter gatherers (most damaged their environments too) without mass starvation / war / suffering and mass extinction where we take everything down (climate change) with us.

So the only way forward is more technology not less, and space is a part of that.

LONG TERM: millions of years - Stephen Hawking, not a selfish billionaire, wrote that we need to expand beyond Earth. Our descendants have as much right to keep going as any other animal, and the next big natural extinction event (like a massive asteroid) dooms 99% of species, so why shouldn't we be the ones to carry life beyond the fragile earth? We can take some other species along for the ride too.

REALITY: It's not zero sum. We could have a corporate and individual wealth tax (not just an income tax and inheritance tax) and tax Bezos, Zuckerberg, Amazon and the like to help people now, and still the billionaires could have enough money left to pursue things like Blue Origin and SpaceX.