The meaning of getting to Mars? Your view?

@Setanta,

I think you get that. It’s baked into the cake.

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An unfortunate order of post arrival times has occurred.

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@Leadfoot,

Leadfoot wrote:

Quote:
Leadfoot Quote:
“Even A small pandemic appears to be an effective way of cutting CO2 emissions.”

Olivier replied:
For a few weeks only... But yes, it shows that it's quite straightforward to reduce CO2 emissions by reducing economic activity.

But if the health of the planet depends on it, we could do a big one.
I’m just say'n

The larger the die-off a species goes through, the more it is deterred from the fine-tuning that is required to achieve sustainable population.

Species that keep overshooting carrying capacity and then dying off before re-growing above their carrying capacity aren't reaching sustainability, or rather I should say their sustainability lies in cycling above and below their stable population size.

Humans should not want to keep cycling above and below our carrying capacity as a species. We should want to achieve a way of life that allows us to live peacefully within our means, like learning how to live within a budget without going through periods of splurging and extreme austerity to balance your household budget.

So artificial pandemics, wars, and/or other intentional population reductions are not a good way to manage human population and sustainability. Even if they were ethical, every time you would cut the population down to historically lower levels, that would just reset the timer for the next population die-off/kill-off.

What we need to do is figure out how to live sustainably and just do that. It requires both technological innovations/solutions as well as changing lifestyles to use less and thus waste less resources. It also requires looking for ways to manage land more sustainably.

CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels are important, but just stimulating them to decrease temporarily in response to large-scale exceptionalities that don't involve sustained patterns of human/economic behavior and land use aren't a real solution, and they're a very traumatic temporary intervention that shouldn't be done intentionally.

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I don't believe "exceptionalities" is actually a word, nor does my spell-check function.

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HEY, PEANUT GALLERY . . .

The topic of this thread is Mars.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I don't believe "exceptionalities" is actually a word, nor does my spell-check function.

You either understood what I meant or not. Should I have said, 'exceptions' instead? If so, does that validate everything I was trying to say?

'Exception,' btw, means something different than what I meant about special situations like pandemics and wars that might reduce population and industrial-economic activity temporarily but not in a way that can be sustained without repeating it regularly.

It's easy to spell-check but hard to figure out how to say relevant things.

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@livinglava,

The topic here is Mars in particular, and leaving Earth in general. You are not saying anything relevant to the topic, which is par ror the course with you.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

The topic here is Mars in particular, and leaving Earth in general. You are not saying anything relevant to the topic, which is par ror the course with you.

I was responding to a post about pandemics as an effective way of reducing CO2 levels.

You were responding to my use of 'exceptionalies' as a word.

Which is less relevant to the thread?

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@livinglava,

Quote:

The larger the die-off a species goes through, the more it is deterred from the fine-tuning that is required to achieve sustainable population.

Hmmm... Let’s see how that squares with the rest of your world view.

In light of that, what do you make of the story of Noah?

I can’t get farmer to get down to the basics of his own world view, will you go down to yours?

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@livinglava,

Your hilariously irrelevant comment about pandemics and the deaths which result from them. You should look up the Dunning-Kruger effect--in fact, a thread has been started about it. It perfectly describes your inability to accept criticisms of the word salads you routinely throw together. Really, if a thousand, if ten thousand, if one hundred thousand people die from COVID 19, out of a world population of more than seven and a half billion, what decrease in CO2 emissions do you allege will result? Just to help you along, if 750,000 people die from this disease, that's one, one hundred thousandth of one percent of the world population. Leaving aside how many of those 750,000 drive automobiles, how many of them use and how much they use of products delivered by over the road transports, and whether or not they burn wood or coal for heating and cooking--you're talking about a sparrow fart in a gale.

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I would remind you, as well, that the topic of this thread is Mars.

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@Setanta,

Yeah, all that is true about direct effects.
But it still scares the **** out of everybody and they stop do'n most everything they’re do'n that makes lots of CO2.

Again, I’m just say'n. And if you think 'human factors' aren’t relevant to the discussion, yer just wrong.

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@Leadfoot,

If this were a discussion of climate change, "human factors" might, once again might be significant.

But this isn't a discussion of climate change, it's a discussion of going to MARS.

Sheesh.

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@Setanta,

I would counter that the ONLY current reasons for going to Mars are human factors.

Specifically, the humans paying their hard earned cash for the effort, have a hard-on for making us a 'multi planetary civilization'. You can’t get much more human than that.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Your hilariously irrelevant comment about pandemics and the deaths which result from them. You should look up the Dunning-Kruger effect--in fact, a thread has been started about it. It perfectly describes your inability to accept criticisms of the word salads you routinely throw together. Really, if a thousand, if ten thousand, if one hundred thousand people die from COVID 19, out of a world population of more than seven and a half billion, what decrease in CO2 emissions do you allege will result? Just to help you along, if 750,000 people die from this disease, that's one, one hundred thousandth of one percent of the world population. Leaving aside how many of those 750,000 drive automobiles, how many of them use and how much they use of products delivered by over the road transports, and whether or not they burn wood or coal for heating and cooking--you're talking about a sparrow fart in a gale.

I never said anything specifically about COVID19, though all the news surrounding it makes it an obvious example to bring up, as you have done.

The point isn't how big the death toll is compared with global population, or even the driving population of the world, as you mention. The point is that we are on a slippery slope of mass-fatality events that are growing in scale and thus testing how much the public can stomach. How long have we been seeing mass-shootings and school shootings? How many people have to die in a pandemic before you consider it a relevant population die-off event? What if multiple, qualitatively different die-off events add up to significant population reduction, such as pandemics combined with famines, wars, migration casualties, etc. etc.?

As the human population grows increasingly dependent on such die-off events to sustain itself economically and avert reforms that would achieve sustainability without such die-offs, we are just diverging farther from the path of peaceful sustainability. Just think if WWII-type holocausts achieved using death camps and war became a structural necessity for maintaining the economic status quo that was established through regularization of such die-off/kill-off events?

If humans had become dependent on Nazi-type holocausts to maintain an otherwise unsustainable economic status quo, what would happen when people tried to question that status quo and argue for reforms that would eliminate the dependency on mass-killing/dying? Probably people would be afraid that population growth would spiral out of control and be unsustainable because the economic status quo would have become that much more normalized and cemented as something that just includes mass dying/killing as part of the recipe for maintaining economic welfare for the surviving class.

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@Leadfoot,

Leadfoot wrote:

I would counter that the ONLY current reasons for going to Mars are human factors.

Specifically, the humans paying their hard earned cash for the effort, have a hard-on for making us a 'multi planetary civilization'. You can’t get much more human than that.

Someone can make billions of dollars and have an interest in investing it in creating 'multi-planetary civilization,' but then the question is what the investment goes to paying for.

In other words, what kind of energy is going to be used for all the propulsion required for the project? It doesn't matter how much money people can make because of the enormity of human economic activities that are being tapped for profits, there is still the problem of sustaining surface-to-orbit rocketry for large amounts of materials, resources, and humans going up there and around the solar system all the time.

We don't have any usable sources of energy that aren't derived from planet Earth. We shouldn't borrow against Earth's energy future in hopes of repaying the debt later by bringing energy back to Earth from far away.

Earth should be a sustainable planetary system without additional energy inputs prior to determining how to develop an interplanetary transit system, let alone an entire industry of extraterrestrial exploration.

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@Leadfoot,

So then you think that authorizes trashing this thread with silly word salads about climate change, rather than discussing the topic?

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@livinglava,

Bullsh*t, I didn't bring it up.

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@Leadfoot,

Quote:

The only thing that can slow economic activity is fear.

So the more pandemics, the better, from a climate change perspective. There are too many of us humans on this planet anyway. Maybe that's why so many folks want to relocate to Mars. ;-)

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Jesus wept, what a buncha weenies. The topic of this thread is Mars. There are any number of threads about climate change where those clowns so inclined can go trash the discussion.

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The meaning of getting to Mars? Your view?

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