Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Terraforming Mars in Just 3 Simple Steps!" video.

Yeah as an aerospace engineer, let me say that Elon is on one hand fantastic in that he's upset the status quo of the aerospace industry and started forcing a lot of people to wake up and that's been fantastic. On the other hand some of his garbage PR work is going to come crashing back down on his ass. When I saw the title of this vid I thought WTF is she doing. Thankfully she's just done a lot of people a huge favor and pointed out how ridiculous the concept is. FYI - When I was doing my degree we occasionally had guest lecturers. One time we had an alumni who was on the team that did the X-29 forward swept wing which was damn good. Another time we had a NASA guy who had just completed a project evaluating the potential for terraforming Mars. Their conclusion in 1987 was its impossible with any current technology or proposed technology. The reasons Sabine just highlighted were pretty much the same as I heard back in 87. One thing Sabine did not mention that I remember from 87. Planets are big complex semi-stable systems that do not respond to being forced into a new state. They have developed over millions of years into the state they are in. If we try to change it will not just simply let us change it. As we are just starting to find out from Earth if you try and change a planet's characteristic behavior (like any system) it will try and restore its equilibrium. We barely know how to alter Earths systems except through colossal ignorance and stupid behavior. Anyone who thinks they can actually change Mars into something habitable in less than a few million years is either delusional or idiotically delusional.
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Prof Mark Blyth (the Political Economist from Brown U.) recently reminded people of what happened a few years ago when one of Obama's Chief Economists was pounding the PR bandwagon of how great America's technology sector was going and its amazing array or products. At one point a person suddenly called out. "You can't eat and iPhone asshole!"
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Yeah as an aerospace engineer, I saw the title and thought WTF is she doing. Thankfully she's just done a lot of people a huge favor and pointed out how ridiculous the concept is. FYI - When I was doing my degree we occasionally had guest lecturers. One time we had an alumni who was on the team that did the X-29 forward swept wing which was damn good. Another time we had a NASA guy who had just completed a project evaluating the potential for terraforming Mars. Their conclusion in 1987 was its impossible with any current technology or proposed technology. The reasons Sabine just highlighted were pretty much the same as I heard back in 87. One thing Sabine did not mention that I remember from 87. Planets are big complex semi-stable systems that do not respond to being forced into a new state. They have developed over millions of years into the state they are in. If we try to change it will not just simply let us change it. As we are just starting to find out from Earth if you try and change a planet's characteristic behavior (like any system) it will try and restore its equilibrium. We barely know how to alter Earths systems except through colossal ignorance and stupid behavior. Anyone who thinks they can actually change Mars into something habitable in less than a few million years is either delusional or idiotically delusional.
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@sbkarajan P.S. They really do go. Technically speaking it would have been impossible to fake. It would have been so obvious that anyone watching the the first moon walk would have spotted it. And long before that all the engineers monitoring and watching the flight would have known where they were or weren't.
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@sbkarajan Not a chance. They went to the moon period. I am not going to waste a second of my time looking at idiotic bullshit that ignores 1000s of irrefutable facts while demanding that I accept without question a few things taken out of context and that I know are taken out of context. Every proponent of the moon hoax has been proven to be a fraud. The classic claim was by Bart Sibrel who claimed the film Capricorn 1 was proof they could fake it. If Hollywood did a film about faking a Mars mission then they could fake a Moon mission. Problem is that in the film Capricorn 1 they didn't get away with it because people in mission control worked out the telemetry was off and the rocket wasn't where it was supposed to be. Bart Sibrel and none of the others who cite Capricorn 1 never mentions that part - WHY? Then there's the whole garbage of why would they fake going tot he moon 9 times. Why fake Apollo 10 where they went there and tested the lunar lander at the moon but didn't land. Why fake Apollo 13 where part of the service module blew up? Why fake 5 more landings after the first when each one could expose the lie? To even consider that garbage and that snakes like Bart Sibrel are telling the truth is to ignore irrefutable facts.
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@olafnilsen1641 Are you saying it will only take 500 years????? Your short by a couple of zeros.
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@olafnilsen1641 Its taken us over a century to shift a planet 1 deg. Mars needs to shift at least 70 just to start to become livable. And there's that slight problem of having a breathable atmosphere. Just to have an atmosphere 1km thick around Mars requires manufacturing over 140 million cubic kilometers of breathable air. That's the difference between the fantasy and the facts. You see back in the 80s NASA considered the concept of terraforming Mars. So they did project and did some basic calculations. I did aerospace engineering and back in 87 one of the engineers from that project visited one day and went through some of the basic numbers with us. Reality is a bit of bitch. People like you listen to bullshit from Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos without ever checking if he's yanking your chain. Don't get me wrong I think Elon has been great at breaking the strangle hold Boeing and others have had on space flight, but that doesn't excuse the bullshit he and others have been feeding people.
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@manofsan Do you know what gives air pressure that 14.7psi that makes breathing possible? Gravity and an atmosphere thick enough to make it happen. Do you know what Mars doesn't have? Breathable air or enough gravity to hold it at 14.7psi at surface level. To get the surface of Mars breathable you need several 100,000 cubic kilometers of air and also increase the planetary mass a couple of times. Sorry but its one of those problems they worked out decades ago and unfortunately clowns just wont listen.
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@manofsan It only starts to address the issues. I really like that Elon has lit a fuse under NASA and even more that he's broken the stranglehold Boeing and others had on the space industry, but I just wish he'd stop blowing smoke up peoples butts. Its infuriating that Boing & others wasted so much money and resources since the time of Apollo. For what's been spent we should have had a moon base 20+ years ago. Going there would almost be routine. But instead we got the STS & ISS money sponges. Yeah they were big steps forward but they were money sponges. What infuriates me with Elon is that we are not solving any of the real issues with either a lunar base or Mars base. Go watch some of Jonathon Trent's lectures and enlighten yourself. You'll find out just how far off we are.
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@manofsan No you misunderstood that line. Its what I call the BES issue. You see no matter what anyone claims humans are guaranteed to do 3 things no matter what - Breath, Eat & Shit. And if you can't solve those 3 problems there is NO off world colony and before you object the answer is NO they haven't and NO they aren't close. If you can't provide and clean the air humans breath, if you can't provide the raw food and water humans consume and if you can't handle the waste humans produce you have nothing. Jonathon Trent was NASA's lead scientist in that field for the last 20+ years and finally walked away a few months before COVID. A lot of what they developed is incredibly useful technology and techniques and will help enormously with handling population and climate change. But they never came close to actually solving the overall problem and that had nothing to do with technical capability it had to do with funding. That's where the mismanagement of NASA under the influence of Boeing and others prevented necessary programs for off-world colonies being completed. After the BES problem there's a host of other issues the number 1 of which is energy. Go look into Kirk Sorenson's background and what he was doing when he rediscovered Molten Salt Reactors and Thorium. After the energy issue there's the ability to extract resources and "live off the land" which folds back into the BES issue.
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@manofsan Are you seriously that ignorant to try playing the acronym game???? It best when you have no idea or clue about what you're talking about to ask questions instead of making stupid claims. What they currently have for an Environmental Control and Life Support System on the ISS is nothing like what is needed for even long duration missions. For starters its not a closed loop system. It requires constant replenishment of materials. As an engineer its so frustrating to put up with dealing with all the BS and hype and garbage and misleading information that's put out these days. There is an insane difference between what they have operating on current spacecraft including the ISS and what is needed for off-world bases. They do not yet grow any food space which is the simplest thing to point out. They do not recycle the atmosphere, they filter out the CO2 and replenish the O2. People like you need to STOP listening to the PR clowns who imply Star Trek is a documentary and we actually have all the technology that's needed. FYI - I am an aerospace engineer and have been doing industrial automation and control systems for over 30+years. I actually work in industries where stuff has to work and PR means nothing. In 2002 I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and he told me to check up on Helium-3 as that was what we'd be going back tot he moon for. So I went off to the Australian mining industry to see how they built and operated mines. You see I thought some practical experience would be worthwhile. What I learned a lot about where the peripherals to the actual mining operation. A few hundred people on a mine site need food, water, shelter, power, communications and they also produce heaps of sh1t and waste that has to be dealt with. Fortunately the air is breathable. It was fortuitous timing as they were doing a lot of building and upgrades in the iron ore industry to meet Chinese demand. So I got first hand experience with what it takes to build and then operate mine sites in remote places. I've seen seen the garbage presented at conferences by NASA and others. They haven't a clue about those kinds of remote operations. They all claim they'll do the maintenance with robots and AI and that's just total BS. I doubt if any (if not all) of them have ever set foot on a mine site let alone spent time working on one. They have zero understanding of those environments. The people promoting asteroid mining are even worse. That's not to say the idea of mining asteroids is bad, but the people promoting it these days are ignorant clowns with great PR. They have utterly no idea about mining. They see the price of platinum claim there's an asteroid and yell out how much money can be made without any brain function put towards HOW it can be done. But the worst of all is Mr. Bezos claiming he will move heavy industry to Low Earth Orbit. Its a staggering level of hubris and bullsh1t. You only need to look at the worlds iron ore production and consider what it would take to lift that to LEO and then bring back the iron produced. Its an insane proposition. The heat generated from bringing that much mass down from orbit would literally burn the atmosphere off the planet. As Dunning says "ignorance can't recognize itself."
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@koolaidjerk Do you have any idea how far off we are from being able to construct a man made ecosystem inside ANY shelter ANYWHERE? Biosphere and other projects have shown that we have an incredibly long way to go in that respect. Even having only a partially function ecosystem is a long way off. Its one of the giant downsides that the Space Shuttle caused. On one hand it was an incredible technical achievement to make a reusable spaceplane work. On the down side was that it cost so much money to operate and consumed an enormous amount of manpower to maintain that it starved other programs of both cash and manpower. Add to that some of the other launch system programs that produced nothing and there's a big problem. A lot of the technologies and systems we actually need are yet to be developed and/or yet to be developed to a deployable state. That's why we haven't been back to the Moon and won't be having either a Moon or Mars base anytime soon.
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