When it comes to building a sustainable settlement on Mars, the technological and engineering challenges are steep. But they take a back seat to the Human Resources department. Forget sophisticated vehicles or sensitive instrumentation—the most temperamental, fragile things we send to the Red Planet will be humans.
After all, NASA’s Opportunity rover roamed Mars for 14 years, separated from Earth by a half-hour communications delay, scoured by dust storms and irradiated by cosmic rays, and never complained or got into a fight with a colleague.
Humans, though, will be sequestered “in a confined space about the size of a small RV for three years,” James Driskell, a research psychologist at the Florida Maxima Corporation, says of most plausible NASA Mars mission scenarios. Driskell and his company have consulted with the space agency and the US military on the psychological issues of crews in isolated and stressful situations. In tight quarters, “people get angry at each other.”
No no no, send the jerks.
Actual useful people will go out and colonize (a word I’m sure you hate) a new land. Leaving all the people you probably admire behind without all those ‘problematic’ ideas.
You will fail to create the communist paradise lemmy users admire so much on earth, while the useful people slowly create a working society on another planet.
A meritocracy, where thought and hard work slowly slowly make life better and easier and situations require everyone to work together. No one is arguing about what a woman is, no one is calling everyone who disagrees with them in politics a nazi, no one is worried that there isn’t enough skin tones or sexual preferences on the planet.
And once life on Mars is ripe and thriving, the ones left in earth, the ‘non-jerks’ who hate colonialization, who hate hard work and beg to be constantly subsidized, who love to argue about social bullshit …. They start complaining.
They start looking up at Mars and calling them bigots for not letting them leach off their Martian society. They call them racists and fascists and nazis. They call them transphobes, they bitch and they bitch and they bitch.
Until they allow more and more immigration of the ‘non-jerks’. They feel badly that without them the earth has only gotten worse and worse. And people start flooding Martian soil, contributing nothing to the society and only taking.
Taking everything until Mars mirrors similar problems as the earth has.
And then, hundreds of years later the process repeats. Useful people leave to colonize another world, build it up, make it a wonderful and working society, while what they left behind devolves into arguments about why a boy is actually a girl, and why the color of your skin or who makes your penis erect is the most important and interesting thing about you.
And then everyone wants to get off Mars, which they’ve ruined, and come ruin another new colony. And social pressure will make sure that it happens. Calling everyone nazi’s and fascists has never failed.
Instead, the non-jerks who stayed on earth should try learning something from the useful people who leave to create new societies, and new infrastructure. And try becoming useful themselves.
Not to worry about meaningless bullshit, and instead try to actually get something done. Stop complaining about what other people need to do and start analyzing what you should be doing, what you could be doing. Instead of just being an activist.
Tl;dr: “I’m making broad, sweeping generalizations that condemn everyone who thinks differently than I do, while at the same time accusing everyone I disagree with of making broad, sweeping generalizations about me. People with different lifestyles than my own scare me, and instead of trying to learn or develop empathy, I’m going to complain that the rest of the world doesn’t loath trans and poor people as much as I do and daydream about a society where they don’t exist.”
The greatest trick the far right ever pulled was convincing the country that “activist” is a bad word.
“As stupid and evil as this comment is, I’m not going to delete it or ban you (yet) because it’s a teachable moment. You have two possible paths ahead. Right now, I guarantee you that these [astronauts] have more courage, compassion, brains, skill — actually more of every positive human quality than you. So take their path – you could learn from them, and try to challenge yourself, to give back, to add something from the world. Or you can stay on your path, and keep being a sad, pitiful, jealous internet troll who adds nothing to the world but mocks anyone who does out of small-minded jealousy. I know what you really want is attention, so let me be clear: if you choose to keep going this way, no one will ever remember you.” - Arnold Schwarzeneggar