Terranistas

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I had a fully formed idea for tonight's post earlier today, that unfortunately now escapes me entirely, my having not taken the precaution of jotting down the crux of the idea before getting entirely distracted by some other stuff. Such is life. So, back to Musk and his mad ideas of colonising Mars to save the people of Earth. Even at a cursory glance, the notion is just plain bonkers, let alone if you actually zone in on the logic and logistics of the idea. As Neil Degrasse Tyson [respected astrophysicist] characterised it in an interview with the oh-so uneducated Piers Morgan: the time it would take to terraform an essentially dead planet with no atmosphere, would span much more than mere generations and consume more money and effort than is imaginable, making the entire enterprise nothing more than a vanity project that reflects an ego of itself planetary proportions.

Instead of ploughing his vast wealth and resources into solving our climate problems here at home - a far, far easier call - he sees nothing nothing outside of his juvenile vision of 'the future' off-world. The fact that it would take thousands of years and countless generations of [by then seriously in-bred] humans to achieve, having endured millennia of privation in the process, seems to have escaped this 'genius'. Mars has prospects. Very distant prospects. The human race needs stuff now, and here, on planet Earth. Someone should just give these wealthy buggers a good slap in the face with a wet fish and get them to wake up to reality.

I'm minded of some student that told me he'd like to go and join the Sandanistas in Nicaragua in their then struggle against the Imperialist forces of the US, et al, including the Thatcher government here in the UK. This was in 1980, and I remember pointing out to the guy that the problems there were the problems here at home, and vice versa: both needed addressing, but that he would be better employed sorting out Thatcherism on the home front than getting himself killed in a foreign country to little practical end. I hope that he took my advice, but there you go: nowt's changed much in the interim anyway...

Comments

  1. Anonymous25 November 2025 at 11:12

    Terranistas returns a YouTube post that is a SIX hour waste of time!
    I get that you were and are not a fan of Sci-Fi but I was and Terraforming a planet so that the likes of Musk do NOT extingush ALL traces of the human race would be more than "ambitious" using the power of the Sun would be feasable.
    As for inbred: the only evidence of North Walse being the inbreeding hot spot, known to Social Scientists, lived in Rachub!!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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