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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of "Mars colonization" - it's missing ecology.
They can't even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica... yet they "dream" of doing so in a place that's hundreds of times more hostile to human life.
That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.
Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.
One of the mandatory precursors to that is a major Hundred Years war that kills lots of people and displaces even more.
Luckily, that's one field where we've made a lot of progress, we won't need even close to one hundred years.
I've been hearing this "we need a new renaissance" spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like "I've got no ideas, so I'll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it." to me nowadays.
"We need a new renaissance" is a dog whistle for "we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance".
Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when "renaissance" is mentioned?
Give me a break.
Maybe some use as dog whistle but I am not. The color or creed of the people who were around during periods of progress is irrelevant to me. I care about the progress.
And Rome had more people of color in positions of power and influence than we can even dream of today. However they did have slaves. Lots of white, Germanic slaves. Google it and chew on that while you think about your accusations of racism.