Classic Neil, always something smart-sounding to say about the wrong thing. It's more about discovery and adventure than fleeing a dying planet. To quote someone that I'm sure is Neil's intellectual superior, "¿Por qué no los dos?"
Because at this rate we'll be lucky to get enough funding and cooperation just to prevent Earth from warming by 4+C, and we need all hands on deck for that.
That's a very bad-faith take of Musk's stated plans. Which is great for sound bites, but there is enough wrong with a good-faith interpretation of his plans that this is entirely unnecessary. He is not arguing in good faith here
For starters "Terraforming Mars" is not a prominent feature of Musk's Mars plans. He's repeatedly stated that it's possible to do so, but the things he's consistently said he wants to do are to establish a Mars colony and turn it self-sufficient. Then maybe terraforming as a long-term goal, but the success of his mars colony does not depend on terraforming at all.
On his whole "if you can terraforming Mars, you can terraforming Earth" I would remind you that Musk's ideas for terraforming Mars include "let's nuke the poles", "we could heat the soil to release more CO2" and "after releasing a lot of CO2, we could electrolyze the water in the ice caps to get oxygen". The challenges for reversing global warming on Earth and terraforming Mars are almost polar opposites
deGrasse's most reasonable point is that the ROI of the whole Mars plan is terrible. Probably not zero (selling flights and accommodations for tourists and science institutes is the easy one). But Musk has said he does not want to finance the Mars plan with VC money, for the exact reasons deGrasse is pointing out. Musk's claim isn't that he's doing it because it's profitable but because it's "geopolitically expedient" as deGrasse puts it. How this squares with the recent news of a SpaceX IPO I don't know, but that wasn't a factor back in 2024
This is probably a good time to tie it back to the article. Because however good or bad a critic Neil DeGrasse Tyson is, Kim Stanley Robinson is an order of magnitude better. And KSR calls bullshit in large part because the entire surface of Mars contains perchlorate at levels at least 30,000x above levels deemed safe on Earth.
Mars is almost perfectly optimized to make perchlorate as lethal as possible because Mars has extremely fine electrostatically charged dust that is suspended in the air everywhere even on clear days, covers the surface of the planet and gets into everything. Dust on Mars is 1 to 3 microns in size while sand on a typical beach is at least 500 microns. That plus global dust storms, it's a perfectly complementary pairing of lethally small and efficiently distributed. Life extectancy shrinks to 5, 10, 15ish years, maybe 20.
What's the fix? Some kind of human genetic engineering, or centuries of bacteria repairing the soil? Those aren't happening in our lifetimes.
Classic sarcastic ironically detached drive-by HN comment. Where is the money going to come from to do both? Every dollar spent on discovery and adventure could be invested in Earth based projects.
