By Albert Burneko
9:00 AM EDT on September 11, 2024
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth.
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We, as a human race, will face so many problems, of various orders and magnitudes in the near future, that thinking about colonizing Mars will be considered an outrage.
It’s already considered an outrage by anybody who’s not totally brainwashed.