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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the projection of one person's reasonable lack of enthusiasm, onto the entire human race.

There are 8 billion of us. If a few want to make a go of it, you can be sure they will know the ridiculous challenges.

Space travel costs are falling rapidly. The Solar System has vast resources that seem impossible to reach today, but won't be for long in historical terms.

People still die climbing Mount Everest, for no purpose I can see. But I am not going to gripe if people continue making the climb.

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But it isn't currently a difficult task, it is a literally impossible task with current knowledge and understanding.

Once we can make a human-sustaining bubble on Earth, then maybe it would be worth trying to go for Mars. Right now claiming we can go to Mars and either return or live there is just as feasible as us going to and living at Alpha Centauri. It is pure sci-fi. Im closer to getting my legs replaced with robot legs that can outrun Usain Bolt than anybody is to colonizing another planet. Or building a secret base at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

There are many tasks that are still impossible with the current knowledge and understanding, but making a closed human-sustaining environment and going to Mars are not among those.

These 2 tasks can be solved with only the current knowledge, but they depend on the solution of many technological problems that require only a lot of money and of work.

Only a fraction of the huge amounts of money that have been invested now in AI would suffice to solve these problems, if a serious effort would be done towards such goals.

Whether it is useful to spend so many resources on such goals is a different question, but developing the technologies for an almost-closed self-sustaining environment is something that certainly would also generate by-products that would be useful on Earth, not only in interplanetary expeditions.

Sure we can go to Mars, on a one way trip. I have yet to see any feasible plan to bring anyone back.

And you can claim we can make self-sustaining environments all you want, but people have been making such claims for decades and every attempt has failed horribly, so im going to go with it is still impossible until proven otherwise.

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