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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

The opposing viewpoint is that since we're decelerating our technological progress and achieving new wealth by pursuing more and more trivial enterprises (come on, it's a messaging app!), a new kind of space race that inspires generations to come might exponentially accelerate our progress, just like the last space race did!

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The idea that sending people off to live on a cold, lifeless world with no shielding from deadly solar winds is some noble endeavor, but enabling people living on this warm, green, living world to communicate with each other is "trivial" is such an incredibly backwards way of thinking.

with no shielding from deadly solar winds

This is plain silly. "Solar wind" is absolutely no danger to people on the surface of Mars, at all.

That's false. Because Mars has no magnetic field, and because its atmospheric pressure is only 0.06 that of Earth, the radiation level at the surface is occasionally life-threatening. In the event of a solar storm, human astronauts would have to take shelter underground. And the cumulative radiation levels in normal circumstances pose a danger over time, even in the absence of a solar storm:

http://www.mars-one.com/faq/health-and-ethics/how-much-radia...

I may have misspoke, but there is a real danger from solar radiation on Mars:

"Solar storms are not dangerous to humans on Earth’s surface. These storms are awesome to contemplate, but they cannot harm our human bodies as long as we remain on the surface of Earth, where we’re protected by Earth’s blanket of atmosphere. Remember, there’s every reason to believe that storms on the sun have been happening for billions of years, since the sun and Earth came to be. If that’s so, then all life on Earth evolved under their influence.

What is the danger of a solar storm in space? Very high-energy particles, such as those carried by CMEs, can cause radiation poisoning to humans and other mammals. They would be dangerous to unshielded astronauts, say, astronauts traveling to the moon. Large doses could be fatal."

http://earthsky.org/space/are-solar-storms-dangerous-to-us

Mars lacks a magnetosphere.

Mars isn't "space." It has an atmosphere. It's thin, but it's enough to stop solar flares from killing people on the surface.

Earth's magnetosphere could disappear today, and whatever other chaos that causes, Earth's atmosphere would still deflect most charged and uncharged particles from space. The magnetosphere has no effect on the uncharged particles, remember.

The moderate-level long-term cosmic radiation will probably be an issue for colonists, making cancer quite likely for anyone spending 40+ years there.

> The moderate-level long-term cosmic radiation will probably be an issue for colonists, making cancer quite likely for anyone spending 40+ years there.

But instead of saying that, you decided to say:

> This is plain silly. "Solar wind" is absolutely no danger to people on the surface of Mars, at all.

instead. So, uh, I guess you win one Internet for pedantry.

For people designing Mars missions, the distinction between solar radiation and cosmic radiation is really, really, really important. (In fact, CMEs often decrease cosmic radiation.)

|we're decelerating our technological progress and achieving new wealth by pursuing more and more trivial enterprises

Sure let's forget about all other examples of technological progress and point to the sell of a startup as a key indicator of modern day progress

Really? We're "decelerating our technological progress"? That's a bold enough claim that I think the onus is on you to provide evidence for it beyond, "someone made a dumb iPhone app instead of curing cancer".

Agreed. The best minds in one area (marketing, business, etc) don't apply to other areas (cancer research, physics, rocket science). Put Biz Stone to work at NASA and I'll bet he could make communication at NASA 10x better, but he's not going to be changing the fan belt on an Apollo booster any time soon.

> decelerating our technological progress

Deceleration from what velocity? That of the 1800s? the 1900s? It seems obvious to me this isn't the case.

That of the 1950/60/70s. The last space race and the cold war provided us with plenty technologies (transistor, computers, GPS, internet) that are still the main drivers of progress nowadays.

I think this point of view ignores all the boring, unsexy, non-headline-grabbing progress that has developed 1950s inventions into what we have today. Progress is the aggregate of millions of very small advances.

Yes, and you could also argue that if our progress rate was sampled at a rate proportional to the total duration of human progress, the period from the 1950's to today is really one sample and the curve at this moment is just beginning to look like a hockey stick.

Here's a lengthy counter argument. https://libcom.org/library/flying-cars-declining-rate-profit...

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